One of my Mother's clever tools of disciplining, my four brothers and I as children, was telling us that the birds that sat on the telephone wires were Santa's helpers. During the year (not just in December,) she would point up to them and say, "They are watching you! You better behave, or they will fly back and tell Santa!" If we did something devious, she would look out the window and say, "Oh, I see one of the birds flying away, look, there it goes to the North pole!"
I believed her. I remember seeing hundreds of birds lined up on the telephone wires and wondering why soooooooooooooooo many of them seem to hang out by our house?
Being Catholic had nothing to do with guilt compared to those damn birds.
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