Sunday was Lucy’s First Communion. That’s a big deal for Catholics for reasons I’m not qualified to explain. Scratch that. I went to Catholic school from kindergarten through college. I’m absolutely qualified to explain it. I just shouldn’t because I’ll burst into flames. Roughly three quarters of my waking hours are devoted to various forms of blasphemy (assuming that being too awesome is a sin), so I’ll sidestep the religious aspect for now and focus on the petty stuff I actually care about. All Catholic ceremonies have two levels: the theological level, which is super important to priests and religion teachers, and the party level, which matters to everybody else. Take the sacrament of holy matrimony. You’re not married when you say, “I do;” you’re married when you dance the electric slide nine beers into the reception. It’s in the Catechism. The same goes for First Communion. On the religious level, you receive a wafer and your first sip of wine at the entirely appropriate age of seven, while on the party level, you wear the fanciest dress of your life and eat way too much sheet cake. Both layers are equally important, especially the cake part, which commemorates the Last Supper, where Judas made his bad decisions after overdosing on vanilla frosting. Lucy’s First Communion didn’t have any sugar crashes ending in betrayal, but it did have all the other non-religious parts that actually make a sacrament count. Hopefully I can joke about those aspects without going to hell, but I guess I’ll find out. The suspense is killing me.
First Communion is definitely a day to look your best. God loves all people equally, but Catholics secretly suspect he loves the well-dressed just a little bit more. A First Communion Dress is the fanciest outfit any of my daughters will wear until they get married—if they get married, and if they choose to wear a dress at all. Maybe they’ll be wed in an aviation jump suit or a medieval suit of armor or Jedi robes. For the record, I’d gladly pay for any of those weddings. I am so looking forward to the traditional daddy-daughter lightsaber battle. The fanciness of Lucy’s First Communion dress cannot be overstated. For starters, it’s bright white, a color my kids are never allowed to wear in any other circumstances. They can get a grass stain just by looking at a lawn through tinted glass. First Communion dresses are meant to be worn once per lifetime, twice on those rare occasions when a kid flunks the first attempt and has to go through the seldom-mentioned Second Communion. We’ve gotten much more mileage out of our dress, though. And I do mean dress, singular. So far, it’s been worn by three of our four kids, and I believe we bought it used in the first place. If we can pull the same stunt with a hand-me-down wedding dress (or Jedi robes), I can die happy instead of broke.
Another element from the party side of the sacrament is the godparents. They’re responsible for giving gifts, so I’m going to spend the bulk of this week’s newsletter talking about them. Materialism is sort of my wheelhouse. The original purpose of godparents was to make sure the kid got a healthy dose of vitamin R if the child’s mom and dad dropped the ball on the whole religious education thing. They were basically supposed to be God’s mafia enforcers, but instead of a severed horse head, you’d wake up with a bunch of disconnected rosary beads in your bed. Honestly, that’s way creepier. Today, godparents don’t do that as much because of a concept called “boundaries,” which weren’t a thing back when the original popes set up the whole system. Now, the main job of godparents is to give you presents at all the important milestones, starting with Baptism and hitting full stride at First Communion, when the kid is finally old enough to tell if you’re good at giving gifts or not. The ideal godparent is someone with a big budget and a good memory. You’re not getting a gift if they don’t remember it’s your First Communion or even that they’re your godparent. That’s why picking godparents is the most important trivial choice regular parents will ever make. Check tax returns and SAT scores before making your final selection.
There’s a hierarchy of options for godparents, and the difference in quality between them becomes readily apparent by the time First Communion rolls around. The top tier is always friends. As non-family members, they’re usually honored enough to achieve the quasi-familial status of godparent that they take it seriously. Chumps. My wife Lola and I picked our college friends Winston and Virginia to be the godparents to our oldest daughter, Betsy. Virginia turned out to be the uber godparent. She not only remembers to give gifts at birthdays, Christmas, and important religious milestones, but she also video calls Betsy once a week to read with her and catch up on life. I’m not even that involved with my actual children. Winston is a good godparent, too, but only because Virginia drags him along for all of her plans. Really, you don’t need two good godparents. You just need one good godparent who can rule over the other one with an iron fist. It’s called teamwork.
The second tier of godparents are aunts and uncles. They’re family, so they’re not as impressed by the godparent title. They’re already obliged to attend certain religious and family functions anyway if they’re within a reasonable driving distance. For Lucy’s godparents, we picked my brother Harry and… maybe one of my sisters? I could ask Lola, but then I’m just going to look bad, so I think I’ll just leave this point unresolved and hope no one in my family reads this week’s newsletter. (Update: It’s my sister Sasha, who already contacted me about what gift to send Lucy, a conversation I also forgot. I should probably write this stuff down. Like, in a newsletter.) Either way, the point was moot because Harry and both sisters live too far away to show up for an extra long mass followed by free booze and cake. (There’s no distance I won’t drive for either of those things, which is why I’m the greatest—or possibly just poorest —of all my siblings.) I also have an aunt and uncle as my own godparents. They also lived too far away for convenient travel but still managed to show up for many of my big days. Maybe they just valued alcohol more. I didn’t realize until I was in my thirties just how great they are at partying. I hope I can go even half as hard as them when I’m their age. If that was the lesson my parents wanted me to learn when naming them as my godparents, then well played. If not, well, no do-overs.
Then there is the worst category of godparents: brothers and sisters. By the time the youngest of my six siblings were born, we lived six hours away from the closest members of our extended family. It was too far to ask any of our aunts or uncles to drive there for a baptism, and my parents had too many kids to have friends of their own. Children are to your social life as rat poison is to soup. That left other siblings as the only viable candidates for godparenthood. Namely, me. I was the godparent to my brother Murphy, who I don’t think I’ve ever talked about in this newsletter before. Good for him. Earning a mention in one of these emails should be the opposite of a life goal. Anyway, in addition to being a terrible brother, I was a predictably awful godparent. My title as his brother dwarfed my godparent status, so I completely forgot about it. I would only remember it when I was forced to attend some religious ceremony for him and I asked, “Who’s his godparent?” Every time, my mom would glare at me and say, “You.” I did exactly nothing to mend my ways. I never gave Murphy any kind of spiritual guidance or life advice, and I spent zero dollars on him throughout his entire childhood. I made up for it, though. By the time he graduated from high school, I was a proper adult (or as close to an adult as I would ever come) with a non-minimum wage job. Instead of apologizing to Murphy for nearly two decades of letting him down, I simply calculated how much I should have spent on gifts for him over the years and gave it all to him in one lump sum check. I instantly went from the worst godparent of all time to the best. And, no, I won’t be the godparent to your kids. It’s too expensive eighteen years down the line. (My wife just reminded me that I am, in fact, currently a godparent to one niece and one nephew, which I totally didn’t forget. As to which niece and which nephew, that’s anybody’s guess.)
All three categories of godparents are still better than the godparents on TV and in movies. There are so many unrealistic expectations out there. I’ve been a godfather at least three times now, and I have yet to run a major mafia family or grant favors on the day of my daughter’s wedding. I really hope that one isn’t a requirement. I have too many daughters. Godmothers in popular media are even worse. They turn stagecoaches into pumpkins with spells of oddly inconvenient durations. Why couldn’t Cinderella’s godmother cast another spell to make the stagecoach last until the next midnight? I suspect she operated under the Blockbuster business model and was looking to gouge Cinderella with excessive late fees. All things considered, I think a lump sum of cash is the best godparent gift. I’m a trailblazer after all.
Sunday, though, I was just a regular father, proudly watching my third daughter in her hand-me-down dress hit yet another milestone of growing up. The most important part of the day was, of course, the pictures. We had to create a visual record to prove we showed up and went through with it. I looked at pictures of my own First Communion exactly once, when I asserted that I did my First Communion alone at a regular Sunday mass and my mom insisted that I did it with my entire Catholic school class. She spent days looking for that photo, and when she finally found it, she proved that, well, I don’t remember, which probably means I was wrong. I look forward to being similarly unable to find any photos of Lucy’s big day. My mom only had to dig through the 200 pictures that covered my entire childhood. Lucy has 200,000 from last year alone. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. There are literally 11,000 photos in my cloud file waiting to be sorted and categorized in some way. When Lola asks if I captured some particular moment, I can honestly say, “Yes,” but I’m totally screwed if she ever asks to see proof. It would be easier to find the Ark of the Covenant, melted faces included. Luckily, Lola has yet to ask for me to pull up a photo, which shows you just how important these pictures really are. That didn’t stop us from taking a million pictures at Lucy’s First Communion until we had one where everybody’s eyes were open. This was as close as we got:
Happy First Communion, everyone. Please, be a better godparent than me. And definitely be a better one than Cinderella’s.
**
First Communion is a day when the entire point is to try too hard. If you need a palate cleanser, check out [Bare Minimum Parenting: The Ultimate Guide to Not Quite Ruining Your Child]. It teaches you to excel by doing less. If you were waiting for someone to tell you that laziness is the right choice in every situation, this is your lucky day. But don’t just take my word for it. Here are some reader reviews:
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Get the book here: Do better by doing less.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next week.
James
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