The Holy Wiener

Growing up Southern Baptist, I learned that many activities that other kids engaged in were absolutely forbidden to me. My devout Christian mother made it a point to let me know that God did not approve of certain things, and if I wanted to stay in His good stead – and hers – then I would have to denounce all sinful behavior. And if I ever engaged in such behavior and God didn’t punish me directly, then she would handle the sentencing herself, usually in the form of a flyswatter or leather belt, along with a tongue lashing that rivaled Ralphie’s mom on “A Christmas Story” when Ralphie dropped the F-bomb as he helped his dad change the car’s flat tire.

No cuss words whatsoever were allowed in our household. I never bothered to even experiment with them when my mother was around, for I knew that hellfire and brimstone surely would rain down should such utterances leave my lips. My best friend and next-door-neighbor, Joey, used to cuss all the time. He introduced me to the colorful expletives that I one day would discover could spice up any story I told. But I never had the cojones to start using such language until I became a full-fledged adult, for fear that God Himself would send me to eternal damnation for such linguistic infractions.

On one occasion, though, I heard Joey use a word that I wasn’t sure would be classified as “cussing.” He told me it wasn’t a bad word, but of course, I felt that I needed to run it by my mother first just to be sure that I was staying within the bounds of good Christian behavior. Upon my inquiry, she was incredulous that my second-grade ears had been exposed to such filth. When she asked me where I had heard it, I told her that Joey had taught it to me.

My mother, concerned for the moral turpitude of children everywhere -- or at least along the stretch of Highway 50 that connected our Mississippi community to the Alabama state line-- promptly called Joey’s mother to inform her that he had been using such strong language. My mother knew that if I ever were caught using vulgar vocabulary around anyone else, she would appreciate a phone call alerting her so that she could deal with it accordingly. In turn, she also chose to return the favor by alerting anyone else’s parents to wayward behavior by their own children.

In this particular instance, however, there was one factor that my mother did not consider: Joey’s mom was Episcopalian. Since Joey was four years older than I was and, therefore, a twelve-year-old whose vocabulary naturally would include various four-letter words, his mother had no problem with the fact that he cussed. What she did have a problem with, however, was my mother’s attempt to tell her how to raise her son. Although I never heard the actual phone conversation, when my mother indicated her disgust at Joey’s word usage, Joey’s mom replied something to the effect of, “Go to hell, bitch!” Wisely, my mother didn’t see fit to correct Joey’s mom on her own language.

After that incident, I no longer was allowed to spend time with Joey until he promised my mother that he would not cuss around me. It seemed like years before he finally agreed to my mother’s requirements, but in actuality, it probably was just several months.

Aside from cussing, it was generally understood in our home and among the members of our church that imbibing alcohol of any sort or dancing of any nature was strictly forbidden. Additionally, when I was a youngster and was channel surfing on the radio in our family station wagon, as I settled onto a local rock ‘n roll station, my mother informed me that because rock music was the devil’s music, I should promptly change the dial. This made complete sense to me, seeing as my parents allowed the morality of my young soul to be shaped by the country music to which they often exposed me. Rock music certainly lacked the ordination of God the way that country music did, with its lyrics bemoaning some country crooner’s proclamation that there was a tear in his beer because his dear left him for another man, or how another singer drove to pick up his mama when she got out of prison for beating up the woman who stole her man. As one later country song so eloquently phrased it, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition!”

While my mother did not consider dancing itself to be an evil activity, she often scorned it when the pastor or youth minister at our church warned of its waywardness. While she claimed to have danced herself behind her own mother’s back when she was growing up, she did not want to obtain a sinful reputation with the church folk by allowing her children to engage in activity that did not conform to Baptist standards.

The irony of the whole prohibition on dancing was our church’s reasons for it. While dancing itself was not considered a sin, we were warned that engaging in it would lead to one of the worst sins of all: premarital sex. I recall one particularly confusing Wednesday night sermon at our church’s weekly youth group meeting where our youth minister informed us that it was impossible for a guy to dance with a girl and not have lustful thoughts run through his mind. At the time, I was in high school and had, by then, danced with plenty of girls, and I could not recall a single moment when I had felt tempted to start groping my dance partner. I never quite understood all this talk about sexual temptation, because I never seemed to have a problem with it. At least not with the girls, anyway.

Neither my youth minister nor my mother had the insight to know that dancing with girls presented no temptations to me whatsoever. I’m sure if they had any clue as to what actions caused my mind to run wild with wayward thoughts and get my hormones pumping, they’d have outlawed the group showers in which I participated right after P.E. class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon of my freshman year in high school. The whole purpose of my showering – or at least the guise I presented – was so that I would not smell when I went to biology class immediately afterward. It just so happened, though, that the best looking guys in my class also thought it necessary to shower right after P.E. Whether they were all showering for the same reasons I was I’ll never know, but the ironic thing is that showering with the other freshman guys caused me to work up more of a sweat than it did to alleviate it.

In addition to alcohol, lust, and rock music, my church eventually declared that the celebration of Halloween was a forbidden activity, all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Halloween, we were told, was a Satanic holiday, and not an occasion that we Christians should be observing. Of course, since the rest of the world’s children were dressing up in fun costumes and collecting enough candy to spike their blood sugar levels into oblivion, our church had to come up with some tastes-like-chicken activity to empower us with a sense of Christian equality on Halloween night. Thus, the idea was hatched that our church would sponsor a cookout for us kids, and it would be called the Holy Wiener Party.

While I’m sure the good church ladies thought that throwing a party whose named played off the word “Halloween” would give us an alternative to engaging in Satanic behavior, in reality, they trained us to become proseletyzing homosexuals.

In years previous, my parents had allowed me to dress up as superheroes and hobos, and they took me to local neighborhoods to go trick-or-treating. But in this particular year, because our church now declared any such activity to be a one-way ticket to h-e-double-hockey-sticks, my mother decided that I, as a fifth-grader, should participate in the Holy Wiener Party. I’m sure her decision was based partly on her desire to look like a good Christian mother to all of the other church parents, and partly so that she didn’t have to spend yet another Halloween trailing behind my younger sister and me as we rang doorbells and then fought over who got the most candy.

In preparation for the Holy Wiener Party, we were instructed to wear to the event costumes that were fashioned after Biblical characters. Coming up with a feasible costume took some creativity, as I knew I wouldn’t be able to find an outfit in the Halloween aisle at Wal-Mart. Cheap Batman, Spider-Man, and Wonder Woman costumes abounded plentifully at everyday low prices, but it was quite difficult to find a store that sold Jesus-sandals and a tunic.

My mother came up with the brilliant idea that I could dress as the Old Testament character of Joseph. As the story goes, Joseph was the youngest of many brothers, and he also was his father’s favorite. His father gave him a coat of many colors, so naturally, Joseph put on his own fashion show to flaunt not only the flamboyant coat, but also the fact that daddy liked him the best. As revenge, Joseph’s jealous siblings eventually sold him into slavery, took the coat and wiped lamb’s blood on it, and returned it to daddy to break the fabricated news that Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. Even in Biblical times, the prettiest people had to suffer for also being the best dressed.

Since my family hovered somewhere in the sociosphere between “redneck” and “plain ol’ country folk,” we didn’t have the money to have some elaborate costume made for my appearance at the Holy Wiener Party. Instead, my mother suggested that we call upon Jessie, the elderly lady who worked for my father’s drycleaning shop doing alteration work. Jessie took scraps of cloth that she had lying around her sewing room, and she sewed together for me a coat of many colors. Quite frankly, it was one of the ugliest things I had ever seen. But, indeed, it was colorful in its own scary sort of way.

When I showed up to the party, the event itself was fairly uneventful. We showed off our costumes, played games, and roasted our wieners just as we would at any other cookout. But, of course, no church event would be complete without the requisite dose of proselytizing expected of us if we wished to keep our Southern Baptist membership active and in good standing. So, in order to give us children the sense that we weren’t being left out of the candy-collecting fun that our pagan counterparts enjoyed, our adult chaperones decided that we could, indeed, fill our sacks full of sugary sweets while at the same time filling the neighborhood homes full of Jesus’s love. Thus, they took us tract-or-treating.

It wasn’t until my years of higher education when I learned that the word “tract” typically referred to a plot of land. As I grew up going to Sunday School, memorizing verses of Scripture from the Holy Bible (King James Version only, please), and learning how to present the plan of salvation to wayward souls, our church armed us little soldiers-in-training with all of the necessary weapons for winning souls to Christ. Because the Bible itself could be a bit intimidating to non-church-goers and take years to read from cover-to-cover, we were permitted to use small pamphlets called “tracts” to spread the news of our Good Lord. These tracts typically were written with a few relevant Bible verses and some admonition to get your soul right by immediately inviting Jesus into your life before the gates of hell opened to swallow you whole and char you like a West Coast wildfire. Because of the urgent nature of salvation, tracts had to be direct and to the point; there was no time to mess around with the Lord-is-my-shepherd-I-shall-not-want messages that often lent themselves to the image of Jesus’s carrying a little lamb in His arms, a depiction most often found on the front of funeral parlor fans that advertised both God’s love and their mortuary services.

The building on the church grounds where our Sunday School classes were taught contained in the entryway a subdivided shelf full of numerous tracts that were free for our consumption. We were encouraged to take a few with us each time we passed by and distribute them wherever the good news needed to be heard. I occasionally would pick up one or two to read for my own enjoyment, but I never really understood how or to where I was supposed to distribute them. It seems that the number one spot I discovered other tracts that had been distributed always was on the tops of toilets in public restrooms, and, quite frankly, I was always confused as to how this type of product placement would result in a religious experience.

Throughout my formative years, I had heard miraculous stories of salvation and how Jesus could save a soul regardless of its geographic location, time of day, or what its owner was doing at the time. Souls who had once been wayward in their ways testified in church that they had accepted the good and merciful Savior while driving down the road in their automobiles, while reading the Gideon Bible that came as a value-added amenity in their $25.99-per-night double occupancy motel room, or while canning tomatoes in their kitchen on a hot August day. But never once, before or since, have I ever heard someone declare that he had invited Jesus into his heart while sitting on the toilet reading a tract. If and when such occasion ever happens, though, I can only imagine that the testimony will go something like this:

“Well, I was drivin’ down Highway 49 south of Jackson to go visit my old aunt Edna in the nursin’ home, and I pulled off Exit 197 at Larry’s Truck Stop so that I could take care of my personal business. I walked into the bathroom stall and forgot to bring my copy of Field & Stream wi’ me, but lo and behold some kind soul had left some lit-tra-chure behind for me to read. So I picked up that tract and began readin’ it, and then the Holy Spirit hit me like a brick! I dropped to my knees right then and there and asked forgiveness for all my sins and invited Jesus into my life. Of course, I had to hop back up on the pot and finish my business, because although the Lord had lifted the burden from my shoulders, there was still a great weight that my bowels needed to expel.”

So, to round out the full experience of our Holy Wiener party, the adults supervising us gave us each a handful of tracts and then marched us single file through the neighborhood to go tract-or-treating. Of course, for safety reasons, we only went to houses of people we knew, all of whom were, no doubt, already Christians and therefore probably did not need to read the tracts anyway. But, at our young ages, we could use all the practice we could get if we were to be effective warriors for Christ when we got older. We rang the doorbells of these friendly neighbors, yelled “Tract or treat!” to them, handed them a get-saved-or-else pamphlet, and then obligatorily they dropped candy into our bags before we made our way to the next house (for we all knew that while there was victory in Jesus, that night, the candy was the real triumph for us).

And so concluded our evening of hallowed Christian activities that paralleled our trick-or-treating contemporaries, providing us the peace of mind that we could enjoy our candy corn and caramel bites knowing that we were pleasing Jesus. Now, I can understand that our church parents must have thought that hosting an event on the church premises as an alternate way to celebrate Halloween was a noble thing. But I’ll never figure out for the life of me how my mother reasoned that dressing me up in pretty colors and sending me off to an event that paid homage to the Wiener would do anything but teach me how to revere, well, the Wiener.