Sundays with the family

Nowadays I spend my Sundays in front of the TV and the computer. I usually wake up at 11 am, get some coffee and look for something good to watch on TV. If the NFL season is in progress, then it's a no-brainer that I would watch whatever game is on. I root for the SD Chargers but they are hardly on TV since they are on a different TV market. The hometeam for the Sacramento market is the Oakland Raiders, but you can't watch them here either because their games are on blackout since their homegames are never sold out. So I'm really held hostage to whatever NFL puts on Fox and CBS. Okay I've digressed, that's a whole different post and will visit the issue again once football season starts...

This morning I thought of how I spent my Sundays growing up in Manila. 'Twas a lot of fun and it revolved mostly around the church and family. If I remember it right Sunday service at HHUMC was at 9:45. And although that means we have to leave home around 9-9:15 to make it on time, our Sundays really start at around 8 am. We're not allowed to sleep in and our mom would wake us up so we can all have breakfast together. Breakfast would usually consist of fried rice, pan de sal, eggs, fried spam, daing (dried fish) or corned beef, with coffee (instant, not brewed) or Milo (have always preferred this one over Ovaltine) and orange juice (no, not freshly squeezed but Tang...yes, Tang). Typical Filipino breakfast.

After breakfast either my older brother or I would wash the cars. This would take a lot of time because my brother and I are very thorough in washing the cars. After that I would shine my Dad's shoes, which I actually like doing. My sister on the other hand would start getting ready for church since it takes her a loooong time to get ready. Then Mom would prepare and start whatever we're going to have for lunch. She'll leave it for our maid to finish while she gets ready herself. Once we're all ready, we all drive together to go to church.

Oops, wait up...that's actually not true since the whole family wontfit in one car (there's six of us). Most of the time my brother and I would leave early to join in the choir. I'm not really good at singing but since the youth group (the MYF) is in charge of the church choir, I would participate once in a while. Sometimes we'd leave early, too, to attend Sunday school. If I feel like not going to church, I just wont get ready and by the time the family's ready to leave, Mom and Dad wont have time to argue with me about not going to church. Which is really never a big deal because we're never forced to attend church anyways. But I still make lame excuses sometimes like not having anything to wear.

Church service in a Methodist church can be long. It's typically an hour and a half long. But there's more activities after that. My Dad will have the United Methodist Men's meeting, my Mom will have the monthly board meeting or the weekly kababaihan meeting (for the life of me I can't remember the name of the women's group in our church), and my brother and I will have the United Methodist Youth Fellowship meeting. We'll usually discuss the youth activity for that afternoon, or if there's no activity we'll have a meeting about the next meeting and the activities for the rest of the week (Choir practice, Prayer Meeting, Bible Study). Boy, there were a lot of meetings!

Again, the whole family would be together for lunch. It's also typical for a Filipino household to have the TV on during lunch. And during this time it would usually be on Spin-A-Win (I'm really dating myself here for those Filipinos who know when this TV show was on), or Germspecial (which eventually became GMA Supershow). These are Game Show-Variety Show-hybrid similar to those that can be seen in Univision and Telemundo (think Sabado Gigante). If there's no church activity, my siblings and I would just watch Lovingly Yours, Helen or I would spend the afternoon with church friends (Angel, Benjie, Bong, Eric, Jimmy) and go to a mall or see a movie. My Dad would usually take an afternoon nap and Mom would go to the store. My sister? I don't know what she does on Sundays but maybe she can comment here and enlighten me or freshen up my memory.

Sundays are fun for me. I have great memories with the family and with the church. Funny now that it's been years since I went to a Sunday service. It's also been a while since our family had a Sunday lunch together. Well, that's part of getting old and having separate lives I guess. We just all live so geographically far apart. But we're still a family.