Sunday prohibitions
Arising from the superstitions thread, what Sunday prohibitions existed in your childhood?
What made you ditch them?
Do any still exist today?
My parents were very strict about what was/ what wasn’t permitted on Sundays. No toys, games, but we were allowed crayoning books ( not paints) books and jigsaw puzzles. No outdoor play.
No sewing or knitting.
We didn’t have TV so that wasn’t an issue.
The worst day was when Christmas Day fell on a Sunday and we weren’t allowed to play with certain new toys, whilst the aforementioned crayoning books were allowed.
Eventually most of our presents turned out to be the sort that were permitted on Sundays anyway. Probably easier for two girls than boys. We acquired quite a collection of Bible-based games.
My parents amended their thinking later in life and I certainly changed my views once I left home.
What made you ditch them?
Do any still exist today?
My parents were very strict about what was/ what wasn’t permitted on Sundays. No toys, games, but we were allowed crayoning books ( not paints) books and jigsaw puzzles. No outdoor play.
No sewing or knitting.
We didn’t have TV so that wasn’t an issue.
The worst day was when Christmas Day fell on a Sunday and we weren’t allowed to play with certain new toys, whilst the aforementioned crayoning books were allowed.
Eventually most of our presents turned out to be the sort that were permitted on Sundays anyway. Probably easier for two girls than boys. We acquired quite a collection of Bible-based games.
My parents amended their thinking later in life and I certainly changed my views once I left home.
Comments
When I went away to university and was trying to decide for myself, I heard a sermon on the subject of the Sabbath v Lord’s Day. By way of example the vicar said that his wife did not sew or knit on Sundays as she did a lot of that on weekdays, so she wrote letters. For him, letter writing was definitely work: on the other hand, he liked to do a bit of weaving if he had a spare hour on a Sunday. This was when I realised that there wasn’t a set list of prohibited activities for all Christians on Sundays ( such was my upbringing).
My parents’ attitude is totally inconsistent. Sometimes we are dragooned to Sunday School, sometimes we go for a drive, or go visiting.
I still do not pay for something on a Sunday, and try to limit the work I expect others to do on a Sunday. However, I focus on positive things I do do, so time for prayer, bible study, that lie in I want etc.
I think they still lock the play areas in Lewis & Harris, and all council leisure facilities are closed which is a source of disquiet as this extends to South Uist and Barra where most folk are RC.
Since I worked all day on Sundays it never made much difference to me anyway!
c.f. last week's news article about an Amazon driver on the Broomway.
By the time I became a Christian I was working as a nurse doing shifts at weekends so keeping Sunday special was never a feature.
Does that mean only hard liquor? At the risk of this becoming an autobiography, when we were in Texas near Fort Worth, before moving to Ontario, you could buy beer in the grocery store on Sunday, but only after 12:00 noon. This meant that just before that hour you would see a lot of people standing around near the check-outs with their beer waiting for it to be legal to pay for it.
I grew up with some restrictions—not surprising being Presbyterian, in the American South, and from a family full of Presbyterian ministers and elders.
For us, it boiled down to spending money. No shopping, for example. We could watch tv, but we couldn’t go to the movies. We could swim at the pool where we had a membership, but we couldn’t swim at the town pool, which had an hourly fee.
Of course, the glaring exception to this was that we’d sometimes go out for lunch after church. That seemed to happen more as I got older, which coincided with my mother going back to work as a teacher. To be fair, she’d readily admit the lack of consistency there. She would note that the restrictions had eased over the generations, and she was willing to ease them a little further.
Also to be fair, while the restrictions were pretty much imposed when we were children, as we got older it was made clear we could make our own choices, and could do so without worrying about disapproval from our parents.
That's my view too. Though I have been an inconsiderate, arbitrary so-and-so with other people's sabbath - I remember being put out that just about the only petrol one could find in N.Wales on a Sunday was at Betws-y-Coed, and I got there on fumes once or twice. Nowadays it's one of those things which is definitely not utilitarian, my choices having a vanishingly small effect on the lives of those who have to work on a Sunday. I try to do it anyway.
As I don't have children, and lived hundreds of miles from my parents, it wasn't a decision I had to make. My own childhood followed this pattern, often visiting both sets of grandparents, even though my parents were agnostic, so it may be as much a cultural as Christian habit.