TODAY CHARITY IS MOTHER OF THE YEAR 2008

Mother of Eric, Becky, Chad and Kyle

• Today I have had my mother for 60 years.
• Charity as been the mother of my childen a mother for 37 years.
  
• Today Charity will be without her mother for the first time.
  
• Today Eric, Becky, Chad, and Kyle will call their mother. They sent her a bow k (bouquet) of flowers from Eric and Leslie, Becki and Joe, Chad and Heather, Kyle and Brittany.
  
• Today Leslie my daughter in law will have a mother’s day without our granddaughter Katie.
  

Charity lost her mother this year, and Leslie lost her little girl.

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Motherhood starts at the moment you are pregnant with a child, and you will be a mother until you die. I remember Mrs. Dennison who was 90 was always concerned with her daughter who was 70. I heard of a lady who was 103 who took care of her 86 year old daughter. You are always a mother.

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When I was pastor/teacher in Altoona, we always had a mother of the year. This was always a very special time with all of our mothers. I wish I could describe to you every mother at First Baptist Church, Altoona, Kansas. What a privilege to know them and to learn from them.

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Motherhood is difficult isn’t it? If I would ask Mom about raising us children, I am sure she would say, "It wasn’t so hard." Mothers seem to say that. She believes I was just about perfect, and Don was the hard case (and her favorite), and then there is my sister Ellen, who really was a case load. But you know, Mom would say, "It’s been no really big deal." Mothers do that you know. Now Ellen is a mother of a fine young man, and a mother to a beautiful young married mother of three, April Williams.


Moms spend a lot of time doing for their kids. They spend a lot of time crying over their kids.

They spend a lot of time praying for them. They spend a lot of time feeling guilty about things they wished they had done for their kids; and they are happy about how their kids love them.

They love the phone calls from their kids. She loves them when they help put up the Christmas tree, that her husband has refused to do for ever. (who would that be?). She loves her kids when they get together and provide heat for the house, and a dehumidifier (d who did a fly er), and other helpful ideas. Kids are great when they grow up.

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Mothers love their kids, even when they are in each others faces. Mothers! We generally don’t really like them until we grow up or become parents ourselves.

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MOTHERS ARE A GIFTED FROM GOD, DON'T YOU THINK!

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Charles Proofread by Charity who corrected the word dehumidifier for me.

ANNA JARVIS....

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but even the "mother" of Mother's Day was disappointed at the commercialisation of the event and ended up getting arrested after protesting at a Mother's Day festival. American Anna Jarvis, who made it her life's mission to have an official day honouring mothers proclaimed, confessed before her death in 1948 that she regretted having ever having started the Mother's Day tradition.But honouring mothers is not new. According to cards.com, the earliest tributes to mothers date back to the annual spring festival the Greeks dedicated to Rhea, the mother of many deities, and to the offerings ancient Romans made to their Great Mother of Gods, Cybele. Christians celebrated this festival on the fourth Sunday in Lent in honour of Mary, mother of Christ.


In England the holiday was expanded to include all mothers and was called Mothering Sunday.However, the modern celebration was the brain child of Jarvis, in honour of her own mother, also named Anna.In 1905 when Anna Jarvis (snr) died, her daughter started a campaign to memorialize the life work of her mother and began to lobby prominent businessmen and politicians.In 1908, Anna wrote to the Andrew's Methodist Church in West Virginia requesting that a Mother's Day service be held in honour of her mother, who was a Sunday school teacher at the church. The first official Mother's Day celebration was held at the church on May 10, 1908.

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Jarvis sent 500 white carnations to be worn by each son and daughter and two by each mother in attendance. Five years later, the US house of representatives adopted a resolution calling for officials of the federal government to wear white carnations on Mother's Day.

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In 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed a Bill recognizing Mother's Day as a national holiday.According to mothersdaycentral.com, the holiday flourished in the US and flowers, especially white carnations, became very popular. One business journal, Florists Review, went so far as to print, "This was a holiday that could be exploited."The commercialization of the day disturbed Jarvis so much that in 1923 she sued to stop a Mother's Day event, and, according to mothersdaycentral.com, in the 1930s she was arrested for disturbing the peace at the American War Mothers group - protesting against their sale of flowers.

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In 1938 an article in Time magazine reported that Jarvis was fighting to copyright Mother's Day.

On its website mothersdaycentral.com said in opposition to the flower industry's exploitation of the holiday, Jarvis wrote, "What will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?" Jarvis died in 1948, blind, poor and childless. However, Mother's Day lives on and it continues to be a bumper weekend for florists, restaurants and gift shops.