Mother’s Day – Honour Your Mom!
First up, we want to remind you to get your flower orders in NOW! to make sure you’ve got your gift list covered in time for Mother’s Day!Mama was my greatest teacher, a teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. If love is sweet as a flower, then my mother is that sweet flower of love. ~Stevie WonderWe know that many of us are guilty of taking Mom for granted. Many of us have also been on the receiving end! That’s what’s so great about Mother’s Day… it’s an opportunity to take a moment and appreciate the woman who gave us life; enjoy a delicious brunch, offer a lovely arrangement of beautiful flowers (hellllooooo!!); and, really, just show her a little much-needed love to fill the cup until next year. Mother’s Day as we know it was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914. Ironically, Jarvis would later denounce the holiday’s commercialization and spent the latter part of her life trying to remove it from the calendar. And, while Jarvis is credited, the history of the day extends considerably further back.
Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. ~Erich Fromm
Over a century before, Julia Ward Howe, best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” promoted a Mothers’ Peace Day beginning in 1872. For Howe and other antiwar activists, including Anna Jarvis’s mother, Mother’s Day was a way to promote global unity after the horrors of the American Civil War and Europe’s Franco-Prussian War.
“Howe called for women to gather once a year in parlors, churches, or social halls, to listen to sermons, present essays, sing hymns or pray if they wished—all in the name of promoting peace,” said Katharine Antolini, an historian at West Virginia Wesleyan College and author of Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother’s Day.
When it comes to the tradition of flowers for Mother’s Day, it begins with Jarvis yet again. The white carnation, the favourite flower of Anna Jarvis’s mother, was the original flower of Mother’s Day.
“The carnation does not drop its petals, but hugs them to its heart as it dies, and so, too, mothers hug their children to their hearts, their mother love never dying,” Jarvis explained in a 1927 interview. ~Anna JarvisThe carnation continues to be a Mother’s Day fave – fresh, delicate, and ever-reliable – the perfect choice for the woman you know is always there for you. Fresh flowers are always a great gift and we expect they’ll be popular yet again this year. Perhaps, though, you might consider a living alternative. Long-lasting and full of life and colour, consider a unique dish garden or one of our huge selection of succulents and flowering plants to keep mom thinking of you for months and years to come. Is mom a chocolate or sweets lover? Sneak one of our lovely chocolate treats or fresh, homemade fudge into her bouquet or gift wrapping! So many great gift ideas, so be sure to stop in and check out all the wonderful things we have in the shop. Plants, home decor, chocolate and homemade fudge treats, and flowers, of course!
