A Peculiar People

By Mary Friedeman

As the summer winds down, I’m playing catch-up with one family tradition. Every year, we have a portrait made of each child. Usually this is done just after their birthday and entails a trip to the mall and includes lunch. Generally, the siblings go along on these much-anticipated outings. Sometimes older children have to opt out due to responsibilities and/or time constraints.

Since all but one of our children have birthdays in the months of February-June, that makes for a busy spring when it comes to scheduling appointments and fitting midday excursions into our school agenda. And this is one of those years when it just didn’t happen. I have to admit that taking a child’s age 9 portrait when he is pushing 9 ½ (and knowing that, unless I want to lag perpetually from this time on, his age 10 portrait will be taken in a little over 6 months) offends my sense of symmetry. But you gotta do what you gotta do; and right now I’m trying to get this program back on track! By the end of the week, we’ll have caught up on birthday portraits through May, with only the summer birthday boy yet to be photographed.

To make this tradition affordable, I have joined the “portrait club” of the particular studio we use. The $40 fee for a two-year membership comes back to us many-fold as it means no $10 per person sitting fee. Since we have minimally twelve photo sessions during the space of two years (and that only counts the annual birthday portraits for each child, not any group photos we might opt to take), I consider it money well spent. By using coupons, we never pay more than $7.99 for a portrait package that includes probably fifty photographs in assorted sizes. More than enough to keep and share!

The one drawback is the location: the mall. Perhaps because our children are mostly male, as my boys have grown older I have become increasingly sensitive to the preponderance of what I consider semi-pornographic photo advertisements, larger than life-size, in many store windows. I’m not just talking about a certain notorious lingerie store, either. In my mind, the ubiquitous presence of this type of advertising makes things extremely difficult for the teenage male who is trying to please God in thought, word, and deed. How can a young man keep his way pure? Apparently NOT by going to the mall!

In a kinder, gentler day when all my children were still young, the mall contained a pet store and a Christian bookstore, and these favorite stops were incorporated into our excursions. I don’t recall the offensive advertisements either. But that was then; this is now. Our solution has been to park by the store that contains the portrait studio and go straight in for that errand. Thankfully, the food court is right next door to this department store, so we head to lunch and then out an exterior door and home.

I’ve never been a shopper, so this is no great loss for me. It’s one more reminder that we are called to be what the King James Version deems a “peculiar people.”

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” I Peter 2:9