You are no doubt familiar with happy hour.

I would like to introduce you to a new concept: unhappy hour — defined as the 60 minutes before church when everybody in your family is unhappy.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever driven to a house of worship with your family in icy silence because you are late, and — this is key — it is EVERYBODY ELSE’S FAULT!

We Methodists are usually buzzed up on caffeine, too, which adds considerably to our Sunday-morning edginess.

Here’s my theory about how unhappy hour happens.

On most mornings, families know their schedules by heart. On weekdays, our family runs like a well-oiled machine. I know, for example, that I can brush my teeth and spit twice in precisely the time it takes me to toast my 1-year-old son’s Eggo Waffles.

Saturdays are regimented, too. Our 6-year-old son rises at 7:15 a.m. and orders room-service oatmeal topped with frozen blueberries. I read the Times Free Press and wait for our 1-year-old son to awake at 8 a.m. My wife sleeps until 8:30 a.m. or so and then thanks me sweetly for letting her sleep.

But Sunday mornings are neither fish nor fowl. Everybody in the family has a different sense of Sunday-morning entitlement, which leads to conflicts.

For me, I feel entitled to read the Sunday newspaper cover to cover and think deep but idiotic thoughts, such as: “Why are there so many ‘bobtails’ in kids songs? You know, like in that doo-dah song (‘I’ll bet my money on a bobtail nag’) and in that Christmas song (‘bells on bobtails ring’).” I can drift away on the wings of lunacy like this for hours or until somebody slaps me.

My 6-year-old son, meanwhile, thinks Sunday mornings were invented so he can exercise his First Amendment right to free speech. He has mastered a peculiar form of Sunday, prechurch meltdown I call the “immaculate conniption.” This is when he spins around in the floor like the one of the Three Stooges and chants something like, “I want a Pop Tart. I want a Pop Tart. I want a Pop Tart.”

At this point, my daddy genes kick in, and I clear my throat to get the proper bass tones in my voice.

“No, young man, you do NOT want a Pop Tart!” I thunder, wagging a finger. “And if you say one more time that you want a Pop Tart, I’ll jerk a knot in your behind that’ll make you WISH you wanted a Pop Tart. ... No, wait, that’s not right. The knot in your behind will make you, um ... let’s see ... OK, strike that. I’ll jerk a bob in your tail.”

As you can imagine, this exchange has a real calming effect on the situation.

This is the point my lovely, almost perfect wife strolls into the room rubbing sleep from her eyes at 8:30 a.m. — just like Saturday morning, but minus the sweetness.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?” she says plaintively. “We’re going to be late, Baby.” (Unspoken: And it’s your fault, you Parade magazine-reading freak.)

Meanwhile, the baby has used this diversion for cover to dismantle the barricade of furniture at the bottom of the stairs and bolt up the forbidden staircase. At some point, we all sense his absence. “Where’s the baby?” someone will say, urgently, and we all scramble like fighter pilots on the deck of the USS Kitty Hawk.

We generally find the baby squatting red-faced behind the ficus tree, which makes him the only person in the house on Sunday morning truly dedicated to the task at hand.

Somehow, after all this, we still make it to church — always frazzled, sometimes furious — where we are reminded to forgive those who trespass against us.

Immediate family included.