By the dozen

I won't bore you with my regular introduction of "we have the best family dinners ever," but last week we had a particularly funny episode that I'll recount in part.

So, we were were talking about the old-timey way of hanging people (throwing them up on stakes on a wall, just in case you were curious), and other random things like why my brother and I long misunderstood Ezekiel 4, and eventually we started talking about clocks. This is because we have a heinous clock that chirps, hoots, and makes other bird noises ever hour, on the hour. It's awful. I took the batteries out one time, but my mom actually likes the clock, so she found new batteries and now the clock is as loud as ever. This is fine, as we say, because what makes her happy makes us happy, but during supper we kept hearing it (it ended up being a long supper, so we heard the clock at least twice, and possibly even three times) and it was quite the topic of conversation.

That brought us to the thought that we should manufacture a clock with the twelve disciples on it! By the way, this may seem like a confusing train of thought to you, but we were talking about clocks, and we'd been talking about hanging people, and Judas was a disciple, and he hanged himself... well, somehow this made sense to us.

So anyhow, we had great discussion about how the clock would look. Would it have sounds for each disciple? Like Matthew, being a tax collector, would have clinky money sounds, and John would have some angelic sound, and Peter and the fishermen-type guys would have... fish sounds. Well, we decided that maybe the disciples wouldn't get sounds after all. But then there was the discussion of where we'd put the disciples. Who would get the 12:00 spot, right at the top of the clock? I voted Peter, but there was significant pull for John. Then we questioned if Judas should even get a slot. Maybe we could stick Matthias instead of Judas. My brother, of course, thought that perhaps we could have Judas at the 6:00 slot, and the clock could show the rope hanging him.

My mom wasn't impressed.

After a while we thought maybe we should just skip the disciples (too much drama!) and just do the twelve tribes. Of course, then there's the discussion about which tribe you should leave out (remember, Joseph got two tribes), and then we started all over again.

I Googled "twelve disciples wall clock" later, sure I'd find that somebody had already invented it, and to my surprise, didn't find anything. I looked only casually, but the closest I could find was a Last Supper clock and an old clock in Prague with the twelve on there, but it's an old clock, and not for sale. Also, there's a rock formation in Australia called The Twelve Apostles, and you can get clocks with the rock formation on the face, but that is, in fact, no help at all.

So one day if you wander into a Christian bookstore and see a twelve disciples clock, well, perhaps it was I, who somehow managed to finagle a deal to design clocks. It could happen!