Category: celebrations
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Counting our blessings
Throughout the pandemic, my husband Jerry and I have counted our blessings. We have plenty of money to buy food, our children and their spouses are doing fine, and we communicate with friends with letters and text messages and on the phone, on FaceTime and on Zoom. We have been not been ill with COVID.…
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A union with purpose
This country isn’t pristine and it isn’t perfect, Amanda Gorman said in her poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. We the successors of a country and a time When a skinny Black girl Descended from slaves and raised by a single mother Can dream of becoming president Only to find herself reciting for one And…
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A new year of surprises
May your new year be filled with happy surprises. As Thoreau once said, “Each new year is a surprise to us.”
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Christmas trees
Our Christmas tree is decorated. We have a decoration that Jerry and I bought at a Christmas store in Michigan only one or two years after we married. And, Christmas balls that we bought the first year we were married. But, the best decorations are the ones that our children made throughout the years. This…
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A child at Christmas
“We are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time,” Laura Ingalls Wilder once said.
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The lessons of Christmas
“I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach,” Scrooge promised in Charles Dicken’s famous play .
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Celebrate on August 26!
The Tennessee Senate passed the 19th Amendment, and then the Tennessee House of Representatives passed it on August 18. However, Tennessee Governor Roberts didn’t sign the Certification of Ratification until August 24. After that, the Certification of Ratification traveled by train to Washington, and Secretary of State Colby signed it on August 26. The 19th…
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Suffragette or suffragist?
The term suffragette was most often used to refer to British women. American women generally preferred to be called suffragists—because they wanted to distance themselves from the more militant suffragettes in Great Britain. When the term suffragette was used in the United States, it was usually a term of derision or disrespect. The distinction between…
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The first women to vote
Who were the first women to vote in the United States? Almost a thousand years ago, women in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy helped select the chiefs who governed their council, says scholar Sally Roesch Wagner. These were women in the Mohawk, Oneida and other tribes that lived around the Great Lakes, and they helped decide matters…
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Celebrate women’s suffrage
Women won the right to vote 100 years ago in August 1920. Celebrate by wearing white. Suffragists often wore white dresses with yellow sashes. White represented purity of purpose, and yellow represented a new day dawning for women.