All of my cousins on my mother’s side of the family are pretty close in age. We all, for the most part, fall within a 10-year window. This made holidays growing up a lot of fun. Sure, we had to drive up to grandma and grandpa’s house in Northern North Dakota, but we got to hang out with a bunch of kids that were our age who were pretty much required to be nice to us.

Until we were old enough to know any better, my cousins and I got along famously. There was various types of horseplay, dares and double-dares that we used to occupy our time. Seeing which of us was dumb enough to jump off of a 40′ tall stack of hay bales was always fun. So was seeing how high we could jump our snowmobiles. But, most of the time, since our grandparent’s house was actually in town and not out on the farm, we occupied ourselves with games of winter football in the iced-over street. I can’t remember how many times we busted my uncle’s headlights with errant, frozen-solid footballs.

The holiday that we were all present and accounted for most often was Christmas. Before we all moved away and started having kids of our own, we would congregate at grandma and grandpa’s house for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. This of course meant that we all went to church together for Christmas Eve service.

Our usual motley bunch of hellions would get spit-shined into respectability, done up in our itchy, starchy church clothes and herded into two full rows of pews at our grandparent’s Protestant church up the street.

We’d mouth along to the hymn and mumble our way through the Lord’s Prayer, trying to concentrate on the cookies and leftover ham and stuffing that was awaiting us back at the house. Those visions stuck firmly in our heads, we somehow got ourselves through the Benediction and recessional without jumping out of our pews and sprinting to the door.

This Christmas, the rush was a little more urgent. It was to be the last Christmas that we all were allowed (or even expected) to go to Christmas Eve service together.

The whole evening started off normally enough. Our extended family sprawled throughout three whole pews, all of the younger kids in the first row, so that the parents could keep a watchful eye, the rest of the high school-age kids mixed with the parents in the next row. We sat, then we stood, then we sat again, stood again, you get the picture. At some places we read along, others we recited after and still others we mouthed the words to dirge-y hymns. All the while, half-thinking about Christmas dinner and presents, presents, presents.

Then came the pastor’s sermon. He sat down on the step leading to the pulpit and started going into a folksy tale about his own family’s Christmas traditions, really trying to connect with the congregation. And it worked, just not in the way that he intended.

Near the middle of the sermon, he started talking about walking into the kitchen and picking up a candy cane from the counter. He said that he sat down at the kitchen table, candy cane in hand, and thought about what the candy cane symbolized. It was supposed to be, as I remember it, a sermon about following Jesus, with the candy cane symbolizing the shepherd’s crook, and so on and so forth. One line in particular, stood out.

“I sat down at my kitchen table, candy cane in hand, and played with it, as I often do.”

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see where we, as adolescents took this statement. Candy cane=penis. Haha, he’s talking about masturbation, haha. Penis.

It started with my cousin Todd, the oldest. He started snickering and tried to calm himself and quiet the laughter, but it didn’t do any good, the goose had been let out of the bag. One by one, the cousins started losing it. It spread through the chain of command, from eldest to youngest, a critically contageous laughing fit from which none of us was immune. The sermon went on, but we were too busy thinking about this pastor playing with his candy cane.

Our parents desperately tried to rein us in, shush-ing us and smacking us on the back of the heads, giving us stern looks and harumph-ing, all while trying their damnedest to keep a straight face. They got the joke just as much as we did, but they, unlike us, had developed a certain amount of self-control. The entire congregation was staring at us and the pastor, slowly becoming aware of his Freudian gaffe, was growing red-faced as he struggled to finish his sermon.

Of course, later that night, after a few rounds of leftover Christmas ham and stuffing, they were all giggling uncontrollably about the “candy cane” moment. But, from that Christmas on, our grandmother stopped insisting that we all come to Christmas Eve mass. More often than not, most of the parents would go, leaving us cousins with my mother’s youngest brother or my dad. We simply were not trusted, and, being kids, that was just fine with us. It gave us more time to horse around and sneak bits of my grandmother’s delicious ham out of the fridge while the lion’s share of the adults were away at church.