For Mother’s Day, my hometown church is having a Mothers-Daughters-Friends banquet with fun activities afterwards. I purchased 4 tickets for me, my mom, friend Beverly (same age as my mom – 89) and our church secretary, Pat. Both Bev and Pat have helped me out so much with my newsletter mailings, copying and stuffing envelopes, so I wanted to treat them to something special.

After the dinner, the entertainment is to deck oneself in various hats, leis, hair clips and beads, go about to different photography stations and take pictures using your own personal cell phone. Before we begin our photo-taking sessions, one of our members (a professional photographer) will give a short program how to pose yourself, family members and what settings to use on your phone camera to make your pictures spectacular.

This idea was actually my mom’s so we’ll see how it turns out.

My mom’s Newspaper column for Mother’s Day

(My mom writes a weekly column for the newspaper, called Walk with Me. I’ll include the below which she had published yesterday, in honor of mothers.)

The only thing I can say about our last few weeks of colder and windier than normal weather is that we have had a longer than usual time to enjoy the flowering trees and bushes. Even the early blooming flowers have hung around longer. I hope you haven’t missed some of the local spectacular floral displays. Now it is time to put in those summer bedding plants as the ground is finally getting warm enough.

This week we all have walked right into Mothers Day, a day that includes grandmothers, sisters, mothers-in law and really, all women. If we haven’t been a mother, we all have had mothers. In our culture, it is a women-inclusive day. Recently I read that more phone calls are made on Mothers Day than any other time during the year. It is also the time when flower sales are highest. I learned from the National Retail Federation that over 312 billion dollars are spent on gifts for this special day with an average of 245 dollars spent on each gift.

Wow! 245 dollars for a Mothers Day gift carries a pretty heft price tag. I can recall a few of the gifts I gave my own mother but the price tag wasn’t anyway near that. Often the gift was a small vial of Evening in Paris cologne from the local Five and Dime . Those cobalt blue vials with the blue tassels looked really uptown to me and besides, they were within my price range.

One year as a gift, I vividly remember spending over an hour reading labels on 78 rpm vinyl records trying to decide which one to purchase. Our family had just acquired a record player and I wanted to add to our small collection of discs. I seem to recall it was a Decca label with a recording of Roy Rodgers singing something. Looking back now, I realize Roy Rogers was not really to my mother’s musical taste, but I am sure she appreciated the well-intentioned effort.

One year, for some strange reason, the family (husband Bill, son Paul and little Connie) and I decided to take both grandmothers to our nearby Lincoln Trail State Park for a grand cook-out and walk around. I’m not sure what we were thinking because both of those women were definitely not the outdoor type. Oh, they did appreciate nature as long as they didn’t have to spend too much time in it. It was a very warm day and as I remember, there wasn’t a lot of shade because the trees’ dense foliage had not yet fully developed. In addition to the lack of shade, the gnats were beginning to swarm. I don’t think either of the grandmothers enjoyed the great outdoors that year. The food, yes. Nature, no!

I don’t have too many memories of gifts I received on this great day. There were, of course, many hand- made cards carefully constructed in various of the children’s school classrooms, thanks to caring teachers. However, one special gift will never be forgotten. Connie and I still laugh about it today. That was the year I was trying to eat a low fat diet. For Mothers Day, husband Bill made a special, intentional grocery trip. Imagine my surprise when I opened the fridge to find it filled with a lot more food than usual. Every item had been wrapped in paper bags and labeled: Celery, carrots, lettuce and other veggies considered “healthy” were identified as “low fat.” His favorite ham, bologna, margarine tub and various meats (as well as ice cream in the freezer ) bore the words “high fat.”

For 30 minutes, I had great fun revealing from the paper bags what Bill had so carefully prepared but it took us several weeks to eat through this bounty of food. I will say that surprise gift has since become our most remembered, and favorite retold, Mothers Day story.

We all have wonderful stories to share but I include this last note concerning those mothers you don’t know: When you are celebrating Mothers Day with your friends and family, please take time to remember those mothers who are in war zones all over the world. Their day will not be as pleasant as ours. We should all acknowledge this and not forget them. Peace