When it comes to celebrating Mother’s Day with a congregation of people, it can become very difficult to make sure everyone is happy. There are a number of different reasons why this is a sensitive holiday for some:
- Infertility
- Death of a child
- Lost child
- Loss of a Mother
- Unmarried
And sometimes traditional “gifts” for all the women in the ward can actually cause more harm than good.
While preparing for this Mother’s Day for our ward, we were considering a number of ideas.
- Cookies – homemade or purchased
- Chocolate Bars
- Flowers
- Nachos during 2nd Hour
- Not doing anything at all…
We weren’t totally in love with any of them. And then we found a comment on an article online that talked about an idea we totally fell in love with.
Mother’s Day Carnations
The idea is this: Everyone gets a carnation. EVERYONE. Guy or girl. There are two colors of flowers, red and white. You grab a red flower to show respect for your living mother. You grab a white flower to show honor for your mother who has passed.
Turns out this is a tradition of other Christian churches out there and we’ve never known it.
This seemed like a great way to get to know each other better and hopefully learn about their loved ones. And since we love doing family history, it fit in nicely with that effort as well.
We ordered these pins from amazon to allow for people to cut off the stems and pin the flowers to their shirts.
We made up some graphics, sent out a message on social media, and off we went. You can download all of that here!
We told everyone about it via social media in advance to help make the process easier when they arrived at the building:
Other ideas for Mother’s Day at Church?
We do know that people love candy, so as a bonus we bought a bunch of Hershey’s milk chocolate bars and wrapped them with a special wrapping paper and a custom sticker we printed off as well.
And here’s the sticker PSD we used:
If you have any other great ideas you’ve seen that would work as well, put them in the comments below!
This was the custom at church when I was a child in the 1950s. I’m glad you are using it!