The American Wake?

Sorry for the misleading title 😀.

In Ireland, when a family member emigrated—often to the U.S.—the night before their departure was treated like a wake, because families believed they might never see them again.

“A funeral wake is a gathering of family and friends to honour someone who has died, usually offering a more relaxed, communal space for sharing memories and support.”

I’m too young to have known such a tradition, but my father did emigrate to America back in the 1950s.

My parents returned just before I was born. If they had stayed, I could have been President 😀. I could be putting 100% tariffs on countries that don’t give me likes on WordPress.com, or on WordPress.com itself for messing up the template in the last few days. Hopefully someone will fix it. It’s OK once you preview or publish a post, but all the text is tiny in editing mode.

Anyway, I don’t see my family as a particularly traditional family, and I don’t know if we ever had particularly interesting traditions. It was mainly things like:

• Christmas
• Birthday parties
• Day trips to Cork, Kerry, Dublin, and so on
• Holidays in Ireland and the UK
• Going to town and having coffee on Saturday mornings
• Going to church on Sundays
• Going to the cinema so see Star Wars, Harry Potter movies, Lord of the Rings, Pixar movies and so on
• Watching TV together

Regarding TV, we’d often watch comedy shows at meal time. Doctor Who was popular too in the mid noughties.

And on Sundays, we’d often watch Bible movies. We even watched a 20-episode DVD series of Wayne Grudem theology lectures. I briefly met him after a talk that he gave in London in 2010, and I told him that I watched the DVD with the wife and kids on Sundays. I don’t know if he was pleased or puzzled 😀. I must watch these again too. I totally enjoy listening to his Systematic Theology book on Audible. It’s split into two parts. It’s 70-hours long in total. When you sign up to Audible, you might get the first 3-months for 99c per month, and you can keep the monthly books that you select. So, it’s totally worth getting if you have any interest in Christian doctrine. He has his own opinions, but I find him to be fair to other evangelical views. And even when he speaks about Roman Catholics, he calls them his friends rather than his enemies 😀. He’s a gracious man.

The family are grown up now. We do occasionally do the same things, but I think that it was more fun when the kids were little and I was the big boss.