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Merry May Is Mary’s Month
Here at Toad Hall we love to celebrate in the month of May by hosting a Crowning for Our Lady. This traditional Catholic devotion involves making a crown of flowers for a statue of Mary and placing them on her head, accompanied with prayers and singing. As a child, I participated with my school. As a homeschooling mom, I’ve hosted or at least organized somewhere on the order of ten to fifteen May crownings.
Yesterday it was so beautiful, if chilly, here in New York that I called up my parents and invited them over to pray, sing and share some fellowship and lemon cake with us.
First we made the crown from ajuga and sweet woodruff flowers.
Then we decorated the shrine with the last of the daffodills, cherry blossoms, phlox, pansies.
Programs for the service.
We prayed and sang several hymns, including this one:
It was a wonderful day.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us!
Published in Group Writing
Last I looked, we were supposed to have snow this afternoon. Yep. Just checked. Still in the forecast.
Mother Mary will look even more beautiful in the snow with her crown of flowers.
@CB Toder: Beautiful! See my reply to Arahant. If you get a chance, please take a picture of Mary in the snow in her crown of flowers. You don’t get that often in May – even in NY. Thank you to you and your family.
Here too, but yesterday it was nearly 60!
Yep. It’s been up and down like two kids on a teeter-totter.
Here too in Virginia. Freezing tonight but maybe 60 on Mother’s Day. Poor plants, birds, and animals. They are probably very confused.
A beautiful post and pictures.
Do your part to share a bit of humor, dry or rich, high or low brow. Stop by and sign up for a day in “A Merry Month.”
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Did you have everyone singing: “Bring flowers of the fairest, bring flowers of the rarest:
From garden and woodland and hillside and vale.”??
I think that song is one of my favorite memories of being a Catholic growing up.
That’s what we’re singing in the video. It’s the end of the song. “O Mary we crown thee with blossoms today. Queen of the angels, Queen of the May. O Mary we crown thee with blossoms today, Queen of the angels, Queen of the May.”
It’s God’s way of wiping out the murder hornets. Right?
Beautiful, Mama Toad!
I have fond memories of doing that in school when I was a little girl – it was a lovely and moving devotion.
To add to that, here’s a poem from priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The May Magnificat
May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why:
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—-
Candlemas, Lady Day;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour?
Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her?
Is it opportunest
And flower finds soonest?
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?
Growth in every thing —–
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathising
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.
Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.
Well but there was more than this:
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfed cherry.
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—-
This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.
It works for me. And fire ants. Keep those critters below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Sweet and lovely. And a beautiful pick-me-up on a day here that’s in the 60s but pouring with rain. We’ve had the seesaw weather too (sleet a couple of days ago), but I think, at least temperature-wise, that we’re through the worst of it. Now if it would just dry up a bit!
Anyone reading this post may be confused about the timing. I wrote this OP May 8, when “yesterday” meant Thursday May 7.
Can’t edit the OP though once it’s been promoted…
Last night we had temps in the high twenties. I covered my precious peonies… Still hoping on those!
Ours are coming along quite nicely, but we’re going to have to uproot and transplant them soon as the sidewalk they’re planted by is about to be dug up, replaced, and widened. I’m hoping they bloom first, as I don’t think they’ll do well being temporarily potted.
New York in May is incredibly beautiful. It basically comes on overnight. These are such wonderful pictures and they bring back good memories.