Here’s one: How to teach your children to address non-family adults. This is a current topic of interest in the reverendhousehold.

R’s thought seems to be the following:

1. There are friends who are so close as to be family. These are the people whom your kids learn to address as Aunt or Uncle Firstname.
Example: PastorG. She’s Aunt PastorG. Same with CG Auntie. No question.

2. Then there are people who are Mr./Mrs./Ms. Lastname.
Example: Everyone else on the planet.


Now of course I just have to come in and muck up that nice consistent system.

I grant that there are certain adults who are unambiguously Mr./Mrs./Ms. Lastname.
Example: Usually older folks and/or people who just have that air of formality to them.

But then there are friends who are our contemporaries age-wise, who don’t quite make the Aunt/Uncle cut, and yet I feel incredibly strange referring to them as Mr./Mrs./Ms. R says I just need to get over the awkwardness--“they’re our contemporaries, not our kids’!” he says--but for me it seems to be a Golden Rule thing. I’d be happy for their kids to call me by my first name; we are familiar enough with one another that I am confident in their kids’ respect for me.
Example: The couple we visited last weekend. We’re not quite part of each other’s lives to be Aunt and Uncle, but the other extreme isn’t right either.

Option: There’s Mr./Mrs./Ms. FIRSTname, but that’s got some kinda weird antebellum overtones to me.

There are probably lots of permutations of the above categories, like people whose kids I’d be happy to have call me Firstname, but who themselves insist that their kids adhere to Mr./Mrs./Ms.

Then there are the people, even older people who just feel like Firstname Folks to me, right down at their core. I think it's an ageless warmth or something.
Example: Our wonderful office manager, a grandmother herself. (Hey, she reads this; she should let me know what she thinks!)
Example 2: When we met Songbird a few weeks ago, it didn’t even occur to me to introduce her as Mrs. Songbird. And I’d happily be Firstname to the Princess… unless it was important to Songbird that I be Mrs., in which case I would respect that.
[getting sore from all these contortions]

I also wonder about regional norms. We have a pretty traditional family structure around our church. Heavy military culture, lots of stay-at-home moms. Mr./Mrs./Ms. is pretty big around here. As for me, I am Reverend Firstname among adults and children, and I’d just as soon drop the Reverend, but I want to respect the cultural mores here. But are there places where Firstname is the norm across the board? And would I feel differently about all this if my kids and those of my friends were, say, teenagers?

The safe answer is to err on the side of formality, I guess. And the best solution is probably just to ask what people would like to be called… oh bah! What’s the fun of that? Whatever would I find to blog about?