The Demise Of Sunday Clothes
The amount of fear and trepidation I experienced wearing my Sunday Clothes cannot be easily measured.
Let me remind you that I am the first generation of my family not to believe in spankings. I have never spanked my daughter. My parents were not so enlightened. Many offenses could trigger a spanking. One, in particular, was playing in your Sunday Clothes. Grass stains, tears, rips, missing buttons, or anything that diminished, destroyed, or devalued your Sunday Clothes was a spankable offense.
For black folk and other races, Sunday Clothes were the best clothes you owned. They were clothes reserved for church, funerals, weddings, and other special occasions that required one to dress up. My household's highest form of Sunday Clothes was your Easter Sunday outfit. My mother would purchase these prized possessions from Wards, Penny’s, Sears, or another anchor store at our local shopping mall. She would start formulating an idea of this year’s Easter aesthetic by lustily paging through one of the ubiquitous department store catalogs.
On Easter morning, my brother and I would be adorned in white or pastel clothing. My mother would coordinate our families’ outfits so that we looked like a coordinated family unit. This was the bane of my father’s existence, but he relented and did his part to maintain peace.
