Onion rings of my childhood

When I was a small child, my mom would make onion rings every Sunday. During church, I would sit there thinking of the onion rings I would get to eat as soon as we got home. There are SIX kids in my family, so yes, we would occasionally fight over the onion rings. I remember these onion rings often being of the "onion ringer" variety, which was the least expensive. Onion ringers are the type where the inside onions are all ground up. So, they are kind of "fake" onion rings. But we loved them, nonetheless. My sister had an interesting technique for savoring her onion rings. She would break them into small pieces, so we really couldn't tell how many she had actually hoarded. Then, she would wait until we were all done with our onion rings and savor them in front of us. Brilliantly Cruel.
The store nearest our house didn't carry "real" packaged onion rings, so we would only get packaged with whole onions in them if my mom ventured out to other stores that were having sales.
Occasionally, my mom would make homemade onion rings. We would eat ourselves sick. We experimented for what seemed like years to make the perfect homemade onion ring. We even went through a "beer batter" stage, which was pretty hardcore, considering that we are LDS and don't drink! We would sit and conjecture what she would do if someone from church saw her buying beer at the store. That didn't last long, as we realized the beer-battered ones weren't quite as good as some of the other recipes.