24 
House & Garden 
THE DECLINE AND 
L ET Gibbon write of Rome’s decline and Milton of Man’s fall; 
these words are penned in memory of a lost delight—the 
American Sunday dinner. 
The family arose piecemeal on Sunday mornings and usually 
late. From the youngest to the oldest member, an air of futility accom¬ 
panied its dressing; there was no use putting on old clothes because you 
must change them after breakfast to be properly clothed for church. 
But however prepared the family was for church at breakfast time, 
it found itself utterly unprepared when the actual, solemn fact of 
church itself, hove into view. Suddenly the Sunday peace was broken 
by the clash of bells. A hectic rush—some ready, some not ready. 
Gloves were lost, hatpins mislaid and children got mud on their 
frocks at the last minute. Finally these misfortunes were overcome 
and the family huddled into an entity, and thus solemnly arrayed and 
arranged, it set forth. In those days there was no such thing as some 
members going early and others later; if a man had his quiver full, 
he needs must show it complete to the assembled congregation. 
There followed the clattering ascent of the church aisle, the separa¬ 
tion of small children in the pew by their elders lest the yoqnger gen¬ 
eration should giggle during worship, the long addresses to the Deity, 
the longer polemics on dogma, the getting up and getting down, the 
kneeling, the squatting, the squirming. Then the Doxology. All con¬ 
gregations sang the Doxology with great gusto—and there was a reason. 
When the family left church it was bathed in a wave of thank¬ 
fulness and relief. Church hadn’t been half so bad. This mellowing 
of sentiment was not due to any higher level to which the service had 
raised it; church was only the narrow path that must be trod before 
one reached the highway of the gastronomic delights to follow. 
F all the joys in this world (there are many) few could com- 
pare with that of sitting down to a gargantuan Sunday dinner 
after the lean and penitential fare of Sunday morning church. 
Then did Sunday justify itself in broad slabs of roast beef or the ten¬ 
der breast of chicken, then did the family feast on all manner of suc¬ 
culent vegetables, on potatoes browned in the pan and saute string 
beans, on corn and buttered beets; on a devastating array of pies and 
ice cream (ground by the hired man in the woodshed while the family 
was at church) and the elusive slip-and-go-down junket. 
In those days Sunday dinner was the great feast of the week. 
Other meals led up to it and away from it. It was the peak of culinary 
attainments, the seventh of the gastronomic heavens. Eaten in great 
state, with impressive ritual and surrounded by the fine vestments of 
best linen and glass, it burst upon the dullness of our week like a sud¬ 
den sun-shaft through a darkened sky. 
In the old days Sunday dinner afforded an opportunity for enter¬ 
taining which was quite unlike the hospitality of any other day. Sun¬ 
day dinner was an elastic meal—you could extend the table to its 
last leaf and there was always enough to go around. It marked the 
weekly gathering of the American family. Cousins, aunts and uncles 
might seem intolerable old bores on the other six days, but seat them 
at the Sunday dinner table, and the very presence of the meal seemed 
to humanize them. For all their stiff and uncomfortable clothes they 
took on a fresh and kindlier aspect; the memory one has of them is 
colored by this Sunday dinner atmosphere. 
With Sunday dinner fallen into decay Sunday hospitality loses much 
of its charm. The company still appears, the family still foregathers, 
but the gargantuan feast is reduced to a rattling skeleton of cold dishes 
and salads to which guests help themselves like time-pressed clerks. 
Likewise does the decline of Sunday dinner give a strange aspect 
SUNDAY DINNER 
to Sunday supper. In the good old times supper on Sundays was a 
light meal of left-overs, sufficient to stay us to the following morning’s 
breakfast. It was a pleasant reminiscence of the dinner that preceded 
it, an echo of its alimentary pleasures. A hot supper on Sunday night, 
designed to sate the appetite after a day of golf or gardening, has 
none of this elusive interest and charm of an echo meal; it is exactly 
like eating dinner after a hard day’s work at the office. And the point 
of Sunday meals is that they should set the day apart from the meals 
of the rest of the week. 
T HIS decline and fall of Sunday dinner bothered me for a long 
time. If we could only have the dinner without the church, life, 
I thought, would be quite perfect, but Sunday dinner without 
the preceding service falls quite flat; it ceases to be an event and be¬ 
comes merely another meal. True, one can raise more of an appetite in 
eighteen holes of golf than he can by singing hymns, he can wrestle 
in prayer all morning and not have the healthy ache of muscles that 
spading the garden gives him, but the appetite is not all that one 
requires. The more I thought of it, the more I saw that the decline 
and fall of Sunday dinner was due to the decline of Sunday churchgoing. 
Do not mistake me; I am not writing azure propaganda, I do not 
belong to the brothers of the white tie and alpaca coat, but I am forced 
to the admission because, until recently, my approach to Sunday dinner 
has had none of the lusty anticipation that once accompanied it. Sun¬ 
day morning service becoming an anachronism, Sunday dinner also 
fell from favor; it ceased being dinner and was merely lunch. 
Being a dweller in the country for a greater part of the year and a 
gardener by choice, I have spent innumerable Sundays working with 
my flowers. We tried the old-fashioned dinner for a time but were 
obliged to give it up. I was sorry, because of the tender memories of 
childhood Sundays. Then the local church called a new pastor. 
U NDER the senility of an ancient minister the congregation had 
diminished. The new parson was young, and full of ardor. He 
belonged to this era and took cognizance of its requirements. 
Heeding the scriptural injunction to make friends with the mammon 
of unrighteousness, he made friends with the men of the town. It was 
to him I owe the restoration of my Sunday dinner. 
He made us a proposition—us heathen men and women. Golf 
was good and gardening was good and he would be the last to raise a 
voice against Sunday tennis. On the other hand, we all had a spiritual 
appetite to a greater or less degree, and there was no way in which it 
could be so satisfactorily gratified as by going to church. There was 
no use trying to gratify your physical appetite unless you first gratified 
your spiritual. Why not come to an eight o’clock service of Sunday 
mornings? Wear your knickerbockers and your sport skirts. Golf 
and garden afterwards. 
We took up the challenge, we heathen of the town, and of early 
Sunday mornings now you can see a knickerbockered and sport-skirted 
congregation pouring into that church. Whereas before a mean, 
little handful attended this service, the church is now full. And— 
the thing that interests me most—we have restored Sunday dinner to 
its erstwhile honored place. We can now sit down to it lustily and rise 
from it with satisfaction. It has also given me a new view of religion 
—I have learned that religion is not merely the divertisement of dys¬ 
peptics and old ladies, but the healthy expression of people with good 
appetites, that the enjoyment of roast chicken follows upon the enjoy¬ 
ment of a good hymn, that the Doxology covers potatoes browned in the 
pan and a vast array of home-made pies. 
FALL OF 
