FUN AFTER FIFTY
VETERANS MEMORIAL SENIOR CENTER, 1455 MADISON AVE., REDWOOD CITY, CA 94061-1549
MAY 2011
General Meetings, Tuesdays 11 am
President, Marilyn Centoni
Professional Bingo, Sun. noon
Fun Bingo, Tuesdays 1-3 pm
Cards, Tuesdays 12-4 pm
Cards, First Fridays 12-4 pm
FAF Professional Bingo Sun. - 1st & 3rd Wed.
PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
Mothers Day is Sunday, May 8th
Armed Forces Day is May 21st
Memorial Day is the last Monday of the month on May 30th
May's birthstone is the emerald which means love or success.
Its birth flower is the Lily of the Valley and the Crataegus
The Kentucky Derby is run on the first Saturday in May and the Preakness Steaks is run on the third Saturday in
May. It is the second jewel in the triple crown of horse racing.
Mothers day may have emerged from a custom of mother worship in ancient Greece, which kept a festival to
Cybele, a great mother of Greek gods. This festival was held around the Vernal Equinox around Asia Minor and
eventually in Rome itself from the Ides of March (15 March) to 18 March.
The ancient Romans also had another holiday, Matronalia, that was dedicated to Juno, though mothers were
usually given gifts on this day.
In Europe there were several long standing traditions where a specific Sunday was set aside to honor
motherhood and mothers such as Mothering Sunday. Mothering Sunday celebrations are part of the liturgical
calendar in several Christian denominations, including Anglicans, and in the Catholic calendar is marked as
Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday in Lent to honor the Virgin Mary and your "mother" church (the main church
of the area). Children and young people who were "in service" (servants in richer households) were given a day
off on that date so they could visit their families (or, originally, return to their "mother church). The children
would pick wild flowers along the way to place them in the church or to give them to their mothers as gifts.
One of the early calls to celebrate Mother's Day in the United States was the "Mother's Day Proclamation" by
Julia Ward Howe. Written in 1870, it was a pacifist reaction to the carnage of theAmerican Civil War and the
Franco-Prussian War. The Proclamation was tied to Howe's feminist belief that women had a responsibility to
shape their societies at the political level
International Women's Day was celebrated for the first time in 28 February 1909, in the US by which time Anna
Jarvis had already begun her national campaign in the US. It is now celebrated in many countries on March 8.
The United States celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the 1880s and 1890s there were
several attempts to establish a Mother's Day, but they didn't succeed beyond the local level. The holiday was
created by Anna Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908 as a day to honor one's mother. Jarvis wanted to
accomplish her mother's dream of making a celebration for all mothers, although the idea didn't take off until
she enlisted the services of wealthy Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker. She kept promoting the holiday
until President Woodrow Wilson made it an official national holiday in 1914. The holiday eventually became so
highly commercialized that many, including its founder, Anna Jarvis, considered it a "Hallmark Holiday", i.e.
one with an overwhelming commercial purpose. Jarvis eventually ended up opposing the holiday she had helped
to create. She died in 1948, regretting what had become of her holiday. In the United States, Mother's Day
remains one of the biggest days for sales of flowers, greeting cards, and the like; it is also the biggest holiday for
long-distance telephone calls.
Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that
Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and
the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.[
Later commercial and other exploitations of the use of Mother's Day infuriated Anna and she made her
criticisms explicitly known throughout her time. She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which
she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace
while protesting against the commercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "wished she would
have never started the day because it became so out of control ...".
Mother's Day continues to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the
National Restaurant Association, Mother's Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a
restaurant in the United States.
Memorial Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the last Monday of May (May 30 in 2011).
Formerly known as Decoration Day, it commemorates U.S. soldiers who died while in the military service. First
enacted to honor Union and Confederate soldiers following the American Civil War, it was extended after
World War I to honor Americans who have died in all wars.
Memorial Day often marks the start of the summer vacation season, and Labor Day its end.
Begun as a ritual of remembrance and reconciliation after the Civil War, by the early 20th century, Memorial
Day was an occasion for more general expressions of memory, as ordinary people visited the graves of their
deceased relatives, whether they had served in the military or not. It also became a long weekend increasingly
devoted to shopping, family get-togethers, fireworks, trips to the beach, and national media events such as the
Indianapolis 500 auto race, held since 1911 on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.
By 1865 the practice of decorating soldiers' graves had become widespread in the North. The first known
observance was in Waterloo, New York on May 5, 1866, and each year thereafter. The friendship between
General John Murray, a distinguished citizen of Waterloo, and General John A. Logan, who helped bring
attention to the event nationwide, was likely a factor in the holiday's growth. On May 5, 1868, in his capacity as
commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic – the organization for Northern Civil War veterans –
Logan issued a proclamation that "Decoration Day" should be observed nationwide. It was observed for the first
time on May 30 of the same year; the date was chosen because it was not the anniversary of a battle.
There were events in 183 cemeteries in 27 states in 1868, and 336 in 1869. The northern states quickly adopted
the holiday; Michigan made "Decoration Day" an official state holiday in 1871 and by 1890 every northern state
followed suit. The ceremonies were sponsored by the Women's Relief Corps, which had 100,000 members. By
1870, the remains of nearly 300,000 Union dead had been buried in 73 national cemeteries, located mostly in
the South, near the battlefields. The most famous are Gettysburg National Cemetery in Pennsylvania and
Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO OUR MAY 2011 BIRTHDAY MEMBERS
3 Mary Del Bono
12 Gwen Sebastiani
23 Cassandra Smith
Mable Homfeld
Millford Davis
26 Lois Habit
5 Anastasia
Kousoulkis
Verna Gertz
28 Lucienne Accristo
6 Vista Walden
17 Vernon Barr 29
Anne Gatton
7 Laverne Kleeberg
21 Bill Duncan
30 Glenn Behm
8 Sharon
Foster
23 Jack Hickey
Doris Ellis
10 Mary De
Ben
Olive Gertz
Amelia Kissling
Ann Hutchings
Linda Kowalski
31 Bob Shawhan
Birthdays submitted by:
Frances Benedetto
SUNSHINE REPORT
We offer our sincere sympathy to the family of Larry Roehe.
Those members still on the recovery list are:
Leonard Woollard, Lillian Ferrando and Sandy Williams.
We welcomed back to the club Gwen Sebastiani.
Nice to have you back with us again.
Jeanne Baxter - Sunshine Chairperson
PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE (continued)
The preferred name for the holiday gradually changed from "Decoration Day" to "Memorial Day", which was
first used in 1882. It did not become more common until after World War II, and was not declared the official
name by Federal law until 1967. On June 28, 1968, the Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which
moved three holidays from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day
weekend. The holidays included Washington's Birthday, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. The change moved
Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal
level in 1971. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW)
advocate returning to the original date, although the significance of the date is tenuous. The VFW stated in a
2002 Memorial Day Address:
Changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day. No doubt,
this has contributed a lot to the general public's nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.
Since 1987, Hawaii's Senator Daniel Inouye, a World War II veteran, has repeatedly introduced measures to
return Memorial Day to its traditional date.
After some initial confusion and unwillingness to comply, all 50 states adopted Congress's change of date within
a few years. Memorial Day endures as a holiday which most businesses observe because it marks the unofficial
beginning of summer. This role is filled in neighboring
Canada by Victoria Day, which occurs either on May 24 or the last Monday before that date, placing it exactly
one week before Memorial Day.