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Sunday Morning is a time for God (or it is my favorite Velvet Underground song?). But while some of my fellow Americans are dressing in their Sunday Best and preparing marshmallow Jell-O salad for the church buffet, I am engaging in a much more secular Sunday tradition: coffee and the Sunday New York Times.

I think you can judge a lot by a person by the section of the Sunday Times they read first. Whether it is the Business (soulless), Travel (pretentious), Sports (stupid), Week in Review (thoughtful), the Magazine (interesting…and probably selfish. We all want to read the Magazine first!) or Styles (illiterate), the section you choose first says a lot about you. Naturally, this causes me much anxiety. If I am in a public setting, such as a coffee shop or a park, I choose the Week in Review first to show my fellow patrons that I do care about gas prices and Darfur and stuff. If I am in the privacy of my own home or with close, personal friends that already know I am slightly shallow and illiterate, I read my Sunday Styles first.

Oh, as I page through some irrelevant headline story about the secret life of socialites and through the 3 millionth Ralph Lauren ad, it is just like Christmas Morning. I peer to see who’s profiled on “Night Out With” (oooh, the indie artist, Santogold, I love her too!) and mutter “MmHmmm, yep” at the advice written by Phillip Galanes in “Social Q’s,” realizing that he might be my middle-aged, gay soul mate.

But, as embarrassing as this is to confess, my oh-so-very favorite bit of the Styles is the Wedding Announcements. As Carrie Bradshaw once said, The Times Wedding Announcements is “straight woman’s sports pages.” These stale, bleach-white announcements should have been left in Eisenhower’s time, but god, do I love them. The supercilious wedding announcements breathe some aristocracy into a world gone Wal-Mart.

Coincidently, after years of reading the announcements, I could write a case study. Mrs. Hamiliton, 25, was until recently a curator at the Guggenheim Museum. (Read: she quit her job to plan her wedding!) Her husband, Mr. Hamilton, 27, is a hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs. Her father is the vice president of Citigroup and her mother is a trustee of the MET. Mr. or Mrs. Hamilton might be related to an obscure president, like Millard Fillmore, or railroad tycoon, in which case they’d get prime real estate on the front page. An Asian woman, who’s keeping her name, married a Jewish man at the Rainbow Room. They’re in their early thirties, met at Columbia med school, and now live in San Francisco. Once and awhile you’ll get your really good-looking alterna-couple. She’s older than him, keeping her name, and works at a non-profit. He’s a graphic artist and they live in Colorado. Every week, you’ve got your token Indian doctors, Distinguished Black Couple, and elderly newlyweds (she’s divorced, he’s a widower), so the reader knows The New York Times isn’t racist or ageist, or just obsessed with WASPs.

A few burning questions after following the nuptials of the elite for many years: how are these people so blond? How uninteresting is Harvard grad no. 876? Do the announcements without pictures mean the bride and bridegroom is really ugly? And perhaps the most easily answered: how many of these marriages end in divorce? About half.

My mother likes the Catholic Church because of the Pomp and Circumstance; I like the Sunday Times, the wedding announcements in particular, for the same reason. She had me look at the wedding announcements in the local paper for a slice of “real life” which I liken to making her attend a silent Quaker mass in a clapboard chapel. Mrs. So and So, 18, is a manager at the Dress Barn? Mr. So and So, 21, attends community college? Ick.

I’ll stick with my Wedding Announcements (which the ever so politically correct NYT has renamed “Celebrations” to include the gays). After I’ve breezed past the latest It-Bag profiled in Styles, I’ll move on to the Week in Review, Arts & Leisure, Travel (if I’m feeling crazy), and finally, saving the best for last, the magazine. They say that newspaper readers are a dying breed. But I’ll be the last one, because there is nothing quite like newsprint stained thumbs, good coffee, and an easy Sunday morning.

George Bush would like us to believe there are only two kinds of Americans: god-fearing Christians and latte drinking liberals. And as I sprinkle some cinnamon on my latte and gingerly unfold the Sunday Times, I’m okay with that (as long as everyone votes for Obama in November!).