Date Contributed: November 12, 2005

Here's my story.  Hope you enjoy it.  We'll probably have lots
of mormoned stories for you since we seem to live in a neighborhood
that's 99.9% mormon.  Almost every neighbor we've met has made it a
point to tell us where the ward boundary is.

I joined a community choir a while ago, and the reason I chose that
specific choir is because it's not a mormon choir (even though I think
everyone in it happens to be mormon but me).  So I'm at choir practice,
and we're singing Sleigh Ride.  There's a line in the song... "there's a
happy feeling nothing in the world can buy, when we pass around the
coffee and the pumpkin pie".  I guess it shouldn't have been such a
shock to me, but it was, that someone was offended at having to sing the
word "coffee" and asked if we could change it so that the whole choir
sang "cocoa" instead.  I just about died.  But the resulting discussion
might have even been worse.  Someone tried to justify singing it because
"the Tabernacle Choir sings 'coffee' when they sing this song".  Someone
joked that we should change it to "decaf" instead only to have someone
snap at them that "it's not the caffeine that makes coffee bad, it
doesn't matter if it's decaffeinated or not, coffee is coffee and it's
all wrong".  Someone else added that when they sing the song, they
always substitute the word "cider" because saying "coffee" makes them
uncomfortable.

The whole thing was just so ridiculous; I couldn't believe that there
was even a serious discussion about it.  You just can't go through your
life being offended at the word "coffee".  Do people know that there's a
world of difference between a word and an action? that saying "coffee"
isn't the same thing as drinking it?  90% of the songs we're singing are
Christian songs, half of them are hymns, but I don't hear anyone saying
"can we change the word 'Jesus' in all these songs to something else
because I'm not Christian and saying that word makes me uncomfortable".
 Reasonable people realize that people write songs about their own
beliefs, and singing those songs doesn't mean YOU have to believe or
agree with everything in them.

Btw, a month ago or so, when we were discussing where to have our
Christmas concert, most people wanted us to have it at a Mormon stake
center.  Thankfully that didn't pan out.  Then when we were discussing
where to have our choir dinner party, they decided they would rather
have a potluck at someone's house than have a catered dinner at a
reception center.  What is with these people?