COLUMN: Hubbub of the Valley

 By Andy Malby, editor

Avoiding holiday meal blessing trauma

I got lucky at Thanksgiving; I wasn’t called on to bless the meal. With more family gatherings around the holiday dinner table in store, though, I have zero confidence that my luck will hold out.

I’ve realized something in the last few months: praying out loud ain’t my forté.

But how do you politely decline to say grace when your host has decided, in some moment of extreme naivete (or malice) to call on you for the ultimate pressure of pressures? You don’t. You accept the challenge and stammer through it.

Recently, I was readying for the inevitable call to bless the Christmas turkey this year, and a quick google of “holiday meal blessing” returned 2 million hits. Some were links to news stories reminding me why I ought to be grateful to be alive to give a blessing in the first place.

Other hits linked me to Web sites dedicated specifically to saying prayers out loud, in front of God and everybody. It appears there are people with nothing better to do than write blessings for holiday meals. One site had more than 200 such prayers.

PoynterOnline, a resource I use now and then for story ideas, issued a grim reminder that my own pathetic verbal prayer skills could remind my dinner mates of Ben Stiller in one of his more popular movies.

“Think ‘Meet the Parents,’ in which Ben Stiller starts reciting ‘Day by Day,’” Poynter suggested.

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

But according to my research, there are ways to avoid getting called on to bless the food. One is to earn a reputation for taking longer to say grace than it takes to eat the meal. Unfortunately, that option requires you to actually volunteer to say the prayer on several occasions. I have sat at a few dinner tables, holiday and otherwise, listening as the designated pray-er droned on and on until the food was cold.

“Keep the blessing short because, trust me, nobody will say, ‘Boy, I wish you’d kept going on that one,’” the Poynter post pointed out.

Among the 2 million search hits was a satirical post by Shawna Collier in The Peoples News about a Chattanooga man whose family banned him from saying grace because he took too long.

“We’re standing there starving and he’s up there getting the Holy Ghost,” one of his family members complained. “He’s blessing the food, blessing the preparers of the food, blessing the house that the food is made in. And then he goes on and on about how the food is prepared for the nourishment of our bodies. Well, what else would it be prepared for? You don’t need to pray for that.”

Just as taking forever is one way to avoid being asked to pray, another is levity. My all-time favorite, of course, is “Father, Son and Holy Ghost, he who eats the fastest gets the most.” Try that this Christmas and see if you’re asked to pray over the food again next year — if you’re invited back at all.