I have two themes to celebrate in this morning’s post…birthdays and knitting.
Mom 1945 - Martha aka Marty
First….My mother shared the same birth date of February 22 with our first President George Washington. Guess who Mom was named after? Yes…George’s wife Martha. My mom and George Washington didn’t knit…but they were surrounded throughout their lives with the clicking of needles. In the case of my mom she was surrounded by the constant clicking of my knitting needles and sometimes those of my sister’s. While President George might not have been directly surrounded by the clicking of those needles, it is well known that Martha’s needles could almost always be heard clicking.
My second thought of this post….Did you notice I said Washington’s birthday and not Presidents Day? I’ve always known that my mom and our first president shared the same birth date…and I remember being more than a little annoyed that the day to honor the first President’s birth date was changed to the 3rd Monday in February so that we could celebrate it with a 3-day weekend. I don’t like messing with tradition! At the time we also stopped honoring Lincoln’s birthdate on February 12 and like many of us I believed that it was rolled into Presidents Day to jointly celebrate the birthdays. Tonight I was reading the Albany Patch and was enlightened to the fact in the federal register it is written into law that the third Monday is celebrated as Washington’s birthday. However, some states choose to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday along with Washington’s birthday and thus we have Presidents Day. You can read about this at news release in the LA Times. There are a few states including California which chose not to retain the federal title but to call it Presidents Day.
Yesterday we celebrated Presidents Day….tomorrow we celebrate the birth of George Washington and my mom. Happy Birthday!
Skein Lane - IN THE LOOP 