Now if you’ve never heard of St. Albert the Great Day, well you must not have someone in your family named Albert!
Our Dad’s name was Albert and on this special day once a year we celebrated St. Albert the Great. Now St. Albert is a German Scientist who was canonized and recognized as a doctor of the Church in 1931, by Pope Pius IX. He is the patron saint of scientists.
OK so what did this mean for our family? Well it meant for some reason that we celebrated the day by having homemade soup. It’s kind of funny how different traditions come around in your family, but yup this day was known as a soup day. Now granted I’m not talking about any boring kind of soup. I’m talking my Mom’s homemade beef noodle soup. And you can’t get much better than that! But our Dad despised this soup and Mom would make him a pot of vegetable beef soup. Now I also like Mom’s vegetable beef soup – but my choice is still the beef noodle!
Well after we prayed twice at the supper table, which we would get some funny looks from our Dad, us kids dug in! And for some reason I can just visualize all 6 of us kids with this grin on our faces knowing that it was a special day and that we pulled one over on Dad by praying twice. Now we did this ever year – so I’m thinking it wasn’t a surprise for Dad but he seemed to play along. Now did Dad really hate this soup that much? I’m not sure, but it was a tradition that still is talked about to this day in our family.
Which brings me to today. It’s St. Albert the Great Day! And after work I had a couple of errands to run in town and then I headed over to Mom’s to drop off somethings for her. When I asked her if she made noodle soup she said she thought of it but didn’t know if anyone would be around to eat it. Hello!! I would sure come over and have supper with her.
On the way back home from Mom’s, Daryl was still out in the field and I made a stop quick in town to pick him up some supper.
Now when I got home I sure wish I had some soup to eat, but no such luck. It was way too late to even think about making any, so guess what I had?
If you guessed a box of noodles cooked and then topped with butter and salt and pepper, along with two small bowls of ice cream that finally ended up with me just eating out of the ice cream box while sitting on the couch – well you are right! I’m just guessing on this, but I’m thinking that I totally failed on my diet tonight.
All I can say is that next year I’m going to be better prepared and hopefully I can spend it with Mom eating some homemade beef noodle soup in honor of the day – St. Albert the Great!