Ascension Day

May 5, 1932  Ascension Day.  The children went to Satanta.  I went along with C. Dalkes to church.  In the afternoon P. F. Rempels were here.

The more conservative a Mennonite group has been, the more it has tended to follow the liturgical calendar.  So the Kleine Gemeinde followed it closely and observed Ascension Day, which falls on a Thursday forty days after Easter.  No work was done on that day, and there was a worship service.  Cornelius went to the worship service with his in-laws, the Cornelius Dalkes, while his wife Margaret stayed home with the two little children, Henry and Elmer, who were only a year old and a month old, respectively.  She had not yet been to church after Elmer had been born on April 7 because mothers who had just given birth stayed home to rest for several weeks. 

The older four children, Mary, Jake, Corney, and John, went to Satanta since they did not have to work at home.  They would have gone to the worship service at the KG fellowship there and then would have gone visiting.  They probably had friends and cousins there.  They may have remembered some of them from when they lived at Satanta and surely had kept up with them by writing letters back and forth after they had moved back to Canada.