St. Patrick may have declined on the green candy, but St. Joseph came through with Krispy Kreme. He came Monday afternoon, in the guise of our crazy-happy-Catholic friends who stopped by to pick up a child from a homework-date, and held out a dozen hot-doughnuts-now. Can I help it if the Church in her wisdom made Monday a solemnity?
No I cannot. If you’re going to observe the fasts, be in on the feasts, too, or you aren’t so much a Christian as a Stoic.
So I was obliged in Christian duty to welcome the doughnuts with delighted gratitude, and you’ll be glad to know I did my Christian duty wholeheartedly.
Would St. Joseph Bring Home Krispy Kreme?
There are of course wrong-headed people in this world who have been deceived into believing Some Other Doughnut is a better doughnut, but that is not the question I mean to address. All we can do for those people is pray; reason has nothing to do with it.
We can, however, reason out the question of: Was St. Joseph the kind of father who’d bring home the doughtnuts?
[Insert for the word “doughnut” the 1st-century counterpart: Some kind of scrumptious but utterly uneccesary low-budget treat that young Jesus would have jumped up and down when He saw it coming, and the Blessed Mother wouldn’t have minded if she did, thank you Joseph, what’s the occasion?]
I argue that he was.
Mary, being preserved from sin, would have been careful with the money. When she shopped, she would have had in mind the hours and strain of the work Joseph did to support the family. She would have looked for ways to make the feasts festive, yes, and she may well have had some small savings from her own work that she used for the odd splurge for the family. But I don’t imagine the Holy Family was overloaded with junk food.
And that, in turn, would give St. Joseph his opening for bringing home the doughnuts.
He who put in the long hours, and worried about savings, and was well aware he’d need money for lumber to patch the roof next autumn — he was a normal man. Mostly he’d want to make his wife and child happy by providing the daily necessities; but sometimes he’d want to show up at the house at the end of a long day and pull out the donuts.
Photo by Neil T [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons. FYI if you like less-sweet doughnuts, when the “Hot Doughnuts Now” light is on you can request a dozen “Original Glazed” un-glazed and they’ll pull them off the line for you at the point shown in the above photo. Take them home and top them with whatever you like.
