Monday, May 4, 2009

Pansies and Mother's Day


When I was a child, I always associated pansies with Mother's Day. In our small country church in Montana, each mother (really each adult woman) was presented a pansy plant in the church service. The children would pass them out. This went on for years and it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me to wonder how the pansy give-away came to be. It turns out that a man in the church had started providing the pansies some forty years ago as a tribute to his own mother (who had died when he was small). After the man died, his widow provided the pansies each year as a silent tribute to him. I say 'silent' because I had to ask alot of people before I discovered who the pansy benefactor was (in a small church of 100 or so it's unusual to keep something like that so quiet). Now, of course, everyone in the area knows because I had a Mother's Day pansy give-away in my book, A Match Made in Dry Creek. I notified the local paper about this and they came out and interviewed the woman, Norma Olson, who enjoyed being able to talk about not only her husband's mother but her mother as well. I know we usually think of celebrating our own mother on the day, but I applaud Norma and her husband for thinking of all mothers. Do you have any similar ways of honoring mothers in your church or community?

3 comments:

  1. Janet, that's such a sweet story!

    We had a former church where they gave all the women a carnation on Mother's Day. It was always so nice!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Missy -- Flowers and mothers just seem to go together, don't they? I like it when a church does something to recognize mothers.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh yes Pansies are so pretty and easy to care for. One of my sons always gives me flowers for Mother's day but they are the cut ones I wish he would give me a live one so that it might stay longer, but I don;t want to hurt his feelings.
    Please enter me into the contest

    mamat2730@charter.net

    ReplyDelete

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