I have no idea when the idea of Mite Boxes came about, but they are as much a part of growing up Catholic as going to confession and telling the priest that you hit your little brother. Sins were hard to come by as a kid. Here's one I never told.
Mite boxes are a Lenten tradition, and this sin will probably have me spending an extra 82 years in Purgatory after I die.
In 1958, I was in the 7th grade at St. Joseph's Catholic School on Pray St. in Quincy, Massachusetts. Really. Look it up. What else would you call the street? The nuns were always collecting money for the foreign missions so we could save the immortal souls of pagan babies.
All year long, we had something going on. We collected used postage stamps so the missionaries could sell them to the Falcon Stamp Company for stamp collectors. Mine were crummy purple, 3-cent Statue of Liberty stamps, although I did get an occasional Irish one that said "Eire" from my penpal cousin, Mary Ann Dundass, who lives in Galway. A lot of my classmates had great ones because their grandparents came from Italy or Lebanon.
Every day throughout the school year, the nuns would set up a long lunch-room-type table right outside the classroom door. They did it twice a day at recess (10:30 a.m and at 2 p.m). Then they set out the candy for us to purchase. My mother rarely gave me money for candy, but Laurie (Lawrence) Eckland always had an extra nickel. He used to carefully place my favorite candy (a red peach stone) on my desk. Laurie was very quiet and so was I. We never said a word. I would lower my eyes shyly and daintily pop the candy in my mouth. I'd let it dissolve until every taste bud in my mouth begged for mercy.
Back to the Mite Boxes ... on Ash Wednesday, the nuns would give every kid in the school a little purple cardboard box with a slit in the top like a piggy bank. The idea was to use your candy money or talk your parents into giving you money for the Mite Box. At Easter, the boxes were opened and the money was sent to the foreign missions so that pagan babies' souls could be saved. (No...I did not steal the money.)
Sister Marie Alfredette, SSJ (named after her mother and father) put a poster up in the front of the classroom. It was the most beautiful piece of "art work" I ever saw. Instead of paying attention to geography, I'd look at the poster. and I hesitate to say I "coveted," it but we are talking about sin. The picture, which came from the Mite Box people, was of the Virgin Mary cuddling a little Black pagan baby. She had a golden halo, and a blue gown the color of the sky in October. There were flowers in the picture, too. When Lent was over, Sister Alfredette took the poster off the wall and announced, "I will write a number on the back, and the child who guesses the number can have the poster."
Anyway, get ready, here comes the sin.
Sister Alfredette very skillfully wrote on the back of the poster, and for a split second just as she raised the poster before the class, I saw a 6.
Oh, the agony.
I wanted that poster BAD! I was a smart kid, so I was in the front of the class, but I was in the second seat in Row 2. I'll never know why they put the smart kids in front and the others in the back. I taught 3rd grade for 2 years and always did it the other way around. Sister Alfredette started with the first kid in row one. "Hmmm," the kid said, 25?
Next kid, 47?
Oh, God, I was dying. Now we were on the third kid in Row 1. There were seven more kids (seven more guesses) before she got to me. Suppose one of those kids saw the 6 and beat me to it?
Next kid, "15?"
But I wanted that poster.
Next kid, "22?" Back and forth in my head, "You love it. Plus you pray more than they do."
Then: "It's a sin, the Blessed Mother wants you to be truthful."
My turn: Sister Alfredette says "Elizabeth?"
I pause -- and then -- I do it.
"Is it 6?" I ask.
"Why, yes, it is." she said. "Congratulations, Elizabeth. It will look very pretty in your bedroom."
The other kids were disappointed, especially since they got shut out so fast. But they got over it. Sister Alfredette rolled the poster up carefully and tied a ribbon around it. I took it home that day and was so ashamed, I put it under my bed and never opened it. A couple of months later we moved to Miami, Florida. End of story. If I put it up in my room, I'd probably be looking at 200 years in Purgatory. As it is, I'll take the 82. I deserve them.
P.S. Sister Alfredette sent a poem I wrote about Halloween to the Sacred Heart Digest. They published it and paid me with a paperback book about the Ugandan Martyrs and some pink rosary beads.