The Prodigious Persimmon Festival

This is the weekend of “The Prodigious Persimmon Festival” in Periwinkle County.

The center-piece of the festival is the “Paramount Persimmon” contest, with persimmon miners and explorers and scientists all vying to dig or find or create the largest persimmon of the year.

Pastor Patty’s sermon for today was “Cleaving the Persimmon of Purity,” based on the Lectionary reading that claims Jesus did not come to earth to bring peace, but a sword. She also quoted Ezekiel 18:2, “The fathers have eaten sour persimmons, and the teeth of the children have been set on edge.”

“That’s why people around here are so sour of spirit and divisive—sour persimmons of the past,” she said. “Instead of a ‘biggest persimmon’ contest, always trying to out-do one another about whose is the biggest, we should have a contest for the one that tastes the sweetest, the persimmon of peace.”

The problem was that all the people who needed to hear it were at the “Paramount Persimmon” contest.

She had to admit, however, that when Wong Wey, the chef at the “Wok Around the Clock 24-hour restaurant and iPod Downloading Station,” took his “William Tell” brand persimmon cleaver and chopped up all those phenomenal persimmons and made them into a prodigious persimmon pudding, it made for mighty good eating.