Friday Evening Tradition

I know for most families Friday night means date night for Mom and Dad, but when you live in a place that produces 6 months of winter it was never something my parents deemed reasonable. They went on dates during the work week in the afternoon when we were all in school. What this meant for me growing up was that Friday nights were family movie nights. We did not watch television on a regular basis with the exception of two times per week. The first was Friday night movie night, and the second was Saturday morning cartoons (which actually only aired for about four hours on Saturday morning-imagine that!) My parents loved PBS, and I still do. I remember that at one point our Friday night movie was the BBC production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe which aired in segments for two or three weeks. I LOVE this version. It is still my favorite, and personally feel that you lose a lot of the underlying meaning with the newer version. That is my opinion anyway. Well our Friday evening movie time would end and my parents would say "time for bed" but then the two of them would stay up and watch Masterpeice theater and Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. My mother owns every single book Agatha Christie ever wrote, and as I read voraciously as a child (only four hours of cartoons a week) I ended up reading a few myself. Even though the old BBC versions of Miss Marple are not very violent compared with todays standards, my parents were worried about how it could affect me so they didn't want any of us to stay up and watch it. I however began reading the books without their knowledge (or so I thought) and wanted desperately to watch with them. So, one day while they were watching I snuck out of my bedroom and hid myself next to the couch arm where I didn't think they would notice me, and watched. I was successful and they didn't notice me that night. As a result the next week I did it again. This time I sat quiet as before, but a hand with a tub of popcorn dropped just in front of me and sat there suspended. I didn't move until another hand dropped, not belonging to my mother, with a full glass of juice. I was going to inch back and then they both laughed "Are you going to take it, or should we eat it?" Well needless to say I was shocked! How dare they have those eyes in the back of their heads to see what I had been doing! When I asked "Am I grounded?" they told me no and stated that I was now invited to the weekly late viewings-providing that I continued to read the books and provided that I do not have any nightmares. I spent the rest of my childhood and adolescence first reading and then watching some of the worlds greatest literature complements of my parents library, Masterpiece Theater, and PBS. Today, as I sat with my popcorn watching the original Miss Marple on Netflicks on my television I dropped a hand of popcorn to a very funny 9 and 12 year old who both asked the same question, and recieved the same answer I had posed not that long ago. I hope that they remember this time spent together as fondly as I did as a kid, and I have every intention of exposing them to the worlds greatest literature. First in print, and then via PBS.