Showing posts with label celebration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label celebration. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Happy Mother's Day Everyone!
Thinking of all of you, hoping you'll be celebrated in a big way and feel like the very special mommas that you are... I feel very blessed to have each and everyone of you in my life. Thank you for the passion with which you mother...
I didn't realize that even THIS day has pagan roots, but here you go, from about.com:
A Brief History of Mother's Day The earliest celebration honoring mothers dates back to the annual spring festival of ancient Greece dedicated to Rhea, the Mother of the Gods.
The Greeks would pay tribute with honey-cakes and fine drinks and flowers at dawn. Much like our current Mother's Day tradition of breakfast in bed! Early Christians celebrated this festival on the fourth Sunday of Lent in honor of the Virgin Mary. Later, in England, an ecclesiastical order expanded the holiday to include all mothers, and decreed it as Mothering Sunday. Servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers.
When the first English colonists settled in America they didn't really have time for many celebrations. The tradition of Mothering Sunday was discontinued until 1872 when Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the author of the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, organized a day for mothers dedicated to peace.
In 1907, Anna M. Jarvis (1864-1948), a Philadelphia schoolteacher, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day in honor of her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. She wrote hundreds of letters to legislators and prominent businessmen on both state and national levels asking them to create a special day to honor mothers. On May 10, 1908, the third anniversary of the death of Anna's mother, the minister of the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virgina (the church her mother had attended) gave a special Mother's day sermon honoring Mrs. Jarvis' memory. Anna handed out her mother's favorite flower, the white carnation. In 1914, Anna's hard work finally paid off when President Woodrow Wilson made the official announcement proclaiming the second Sunday in May as a national holiday in honor of mothers.
I didn't realize that even THIS day has pagan roots, but here you go, from about.com:
A Brief History of Mother's Day The earliest celebration honoring mothers dates back to the annual spring festival of ancient Greece dedicated to Rhea, the Mother of the Gods.
The Greeks would pay tribute with honey-cakes and fine drinks and flowers at dawn. Much like our current Mother's Day tradition of breakfast in bed! Early Christians celebrated this festival on the fourth Sunday of Lent in honor of the Virgin Mary. Later, in England, an ecclesiastical order expanded the holiday to include all mothers, and decreed it as Mothering Sunday. Servants would have the day off and were encouraged to return home and spend the day with their mothers.
When the first English colonists settled in America they didn't really have time for many celebrations. The tradition of Mothering Sunday was discontinued until 1872 when Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), the author of the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, organized a day for mothers dedicated to peace.
In 1907, Anna M. Jarvis (1864-1948), a Philadelphia schoolteacher, began a campaign to establish a national Mother's Day in honor of her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. She wrote hundreds of letters to legislators and prominent businessmen on both state and national levels asking them to create a special day to honor mothers. On May 10, 1908, the third anniversary of the death of Anna's mother, the minister of the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virgina (the church her mother had attended) gave a special Mother's day sermon honoring Mrs. Jarvis' memory. Anna handed out her mother's favorite flower, the white carnation. In 1914, Anna's hard work finally paid off when President Woodrow Wilson made the official announcement proclaiming the second Sunday in May as a national holiday in honor of mothers.
Thursday, February 1, 2007
Celebration Tomorrow
Brrrrrrrr! If tomorrow is anything like today, we'll be celebrating INdoors! We have a hearth fire, which is a big part of the Imbolc celebration, so we'll gather around it. It'll be more crowded, but we'll manage nicely, I'm sure. So 9 o'clock it is.
Just a couple of things: There is one part of the fire ritual where we encourage our children (and us) to release any psychic "dust" we may be holding onto from the past year. We draw a picture or write something we regret, a word we wished we hadn't said, or something we wish we'd done differently. This is all done in private, unless someone feels they want to share what they're releasing. Then we crumple the paper and THROW it into the fire symbolically releasing it from our minds and hearts. So, we all can keep this ceremony in mind in case we need a little time to think of something. Then the other part is writing down something we want to manifest in this coming year, so we can be thinking of that too.
See you tomorrow! Use the comments to ask any questions or share ideas...
Just a couple of things: There is one part of the fire ritual where we encourage our children (and us) to release any psychic "dust" we may be holding onto from the past year. We draw a picture or write something we regret, a word we wished we hadn't said, or something we wish we'd done differently. This is all done in private, unless someone feels they want to share what they're releasing. Then we crumple the paper and THROW it into the fire symbolically releasing it from our minds and hearts. So, we all can keep this ceremony in mind in case we need a little time to think of something. Then the other part is writing down something we want to manifest in this coming year, so we can be thinking of that too.
See you tomorrow! Use the comments to ask any questions or share ideas...
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