Grandparents Day is a time to celebrate our mom and dad’s parents and the significant impact many of them have had on us.
On Grandparents Day people often visit their loved ones, give them a phone call or send them a card. Others use the time to reminiscence about their late grandparents, possibly remembering the days cuddled in their laps listening to their stories.
According to Reader’s Digest, Marian McQuade of West Virginia created the holiday in 1956 after realizing a lot of senior citizens in her local nursing home were not visited by family while she was trying to plan a community celebration of the elderly.
McQuade then made it her mission to ensure they were not forgotten by creating Grandparents Day. It became an official holiday in 1978 when it was signed into law by former President Jimmy Carter.
However, the purpose of the holiday is not meant just for grandchildren to celebrate grandparents, but also the reverse. The National Grandparents Day Council says that the holiday is also meant for grandparents to celebrate their grandchildren.
The holiday is always celebrated on the Sunday after Labor Day in the United States. This year the special day is on September 8.
This year the official theme is “Grand Minds: Learn, Love, Legacy”. Generations United is encouraging people to #DoSomethingGrand this year with their grandparents and have a list of activity ideas on their website.
Grandparents Day Gift Ideas
We put together a Grandparents Day gift basket for those looking for ideas for Grandparents Day. Check out our basket below!
To silver and gold, jingle and jangle, add another classic holiday pairing: “Berries & Boughs”
The last one is courtesy of Joanne Beasy of Grove City, the runner-up in our annual name-the-arrangement contest.
The contest winner was Jennifer Davis of Lebanon, Pa., with the name “Merriment.” Davis entered the contest through Connells Maple Lee’s sister company Royer’s Flowers & Gifts, which has 15 stores in Pennsylvania.
Beasy and Davis each will receive the new holiday arrangement as their prize.
The arrangement features carnations, poms and a rose with noble fir and boxwood, ribbon and berries, all in a silver and red tin. It will be available for purchase after Thanksgiving.
Congratulations to Beasy and Davis and thank you to everyone who participated. We look forward to doing this again next year!
Christmas in July is giving way to the holiday arrangement of August.
This year’s Conells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts name-the-arrangement contest focuses on a new holiday design.
The arrangement features carnations, poms and a rose with noble fir and boxwood, ribbon and berries, all in a silver and red tin. What it lacks is a name.
To view the arrangement and enter the contest, visit cmlflowers.com/contest. Limit one entry daily per email address, through Aug. 18.
One winner and one runner-up will be selected from entries submitted to Connells Maple Lee and its sister company in Pennsylvania. Both the winner and runner-up will receive the arrangement (retail value $39.99) as their prize.
Shea’s design will adorn the birthday card that all members receive in the coming year. The third-grader “just loves to be creative and outgoing,” her mother said.
In the year ahead, members of the Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts Kids Club will celebrate a “hoppy” birthday courtesy of Shea Berridge.
Shea, who is turning 9 and entering third grade, is the winner of this year’s kids club birthday card design contest.
Her design features a bunny wearing a flower tiera and will adorn the electronic card that kids club members receive in the coming year. Her prize is a free flower delivery.
She is the daughter of Shawn and Christi Berridge, who live in Lewis Center with Shea and her older brother.
“She just loves to be creative and outgoing,” Christi said about Shea, who is active in dance, cheer and the Girl Scouts.
The kids club is free for children ages 5 to 12. Parents may register their children at any Connells Maple Lee store or at cmlflowers.com/kidsclub. Kids club benefits also include a membership card, online activities and a quarterly e-mail newsletter.
If you have a question about flowers, don’t hesitate to contact your local store.
Besides providing the freshest, most beautiful product we can, Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts prides itself on delivering top-notch customer service before and after a sale.
We’re always happy to discuss a specific situation, but here are answers to some of the most common questions we receive from customers.
Q: I’ve heard of homemade flower foods, including mixing Sprite with aspirin or placing a penny in the bottom of a vase. Do these options work as well as your flower packets do in prolonging flower freshness?
A: No, our flower food is formulated with ingredients to help lower the pH levels, antimicrobials to help prevent stem rot, and sugar to provide energy for buds to open. Home remedies won’t achieve those ends.
Q: Is this item appropriate for this occasion?
A: We answer this question with questions of our own. For instance, will a recipient be home enough or attentive enough to care for a plant, or would fresh flowers be a better option requiring less of a commitment?
Funerals prompt many special requests, such as adding pictures or personal items to a funeral arrangement. We help families decide the best way to honor their loved one.
Q: What is wrong with my plant?
A: Most of the time there is an issue with either too much or not enough water. Other times the cause is with bugs or disease. We usually can figure it out with the help of a picture.
Q: Do you carry blue or black roses?
A: Unfortunately, neither grows naturally. Right now, we offer a blue rose that has been died and dried. We don’t recommend using floral spray to achieve those colors because the spray can shorten the vase life of the rose. We typically suggest complementing the rose with babies breath that has been sprayed blue or black or adding an accent ribbon in the desired color.
Q: What do the flowers (especially roses) mean?
A: A red rose symbolizes love; a yellow rose is for happiness/friendship; a pink rose is for admiration; a white rose represents peace, sympathy and hope. (You’ll find more on flower meanings here.)
Roses are available year-round, but they’re a particularly good value in June thanks to their natural growing cycle.
A rose farm typically harvests its crop every six to eight weeks, or about the amount of time between Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day in May. But while there’s another big crop of roses in late spring, there is not a corresponding holiday to absorb all of them.
The sale
That leaves a thorny situation in which supply outstrips demand, making roses more affordable for florists and, by extension, our customers.
Our sale comprises:
One-dozen rose bunch for $9.42 (in-store only)
A Rosie arrangement featuring one-dozen or two-dozen colored roses for $46.99 or $56.99, respectively
A Rose Delight arrangement with four-dozen colored roses for $99.99, or $15 off the regular price.
Three-dozen arranged long-stemmed red roses for $149.00, or $20 off.
Whether you’re giving them as a gift to someone else or showing yourself a little love, roses are ready and at an even better value through June 15.
While the New York Times noted that several places make similar claims, what’s not in dispute is the central role that flowers have played throughout the history of Memorial Day.
In Boalsburg, three women – Emma Hunter, Sophie Keller and Elizabeth Myers – were said to have placed flowers and wreaths on the graves of men who died while serving the Union during the Civil War.
“The holiday grew out of the Civil War,” the Times wrote in 2023, “as Americans – Northern, Southern, Black and white – struggled to honor the staggering number of dead soldiers, at least 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time.”
The war ended in spring 1865. Soon after, in Charleston, S.C., at a service to commemorate the lives of Union captives buried in a mass grave, 3,000 schoolchildren led the way carrying roses. In 1866 in Columbus, Miss., women placed flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers.
The first national commemoration was in 1868, when Gen. John Logan, the commander in chief of an organization of Union veterans, called for May 30 to be “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”
“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,” he wrote, “Between the crosses row on row.”
The American Legion adopted the poppy as its official flower in 1920 and began distributing fabric poppies nationally in 1924. At the American Legion’s urging, Congress designated the Friday before Memorial Day as National Poppy Day.
After World War II, the holiday became better known as Memorial Day and officially in 1967. Memorial Day was observed on May 30 until 1971, when it was enshrined as the last Monday of May to ensure a three-day weekend.
While officially meant to honor the service and sacrifice of America’s fallen soldiers, Memorial Day has assumed broader meaning for some, who use the occasion to pay tribute to family and friends who have died.
One constant remains: flowers.
Flowers of Remembrance Day
Perhaps no greater example exists than Arlington National Cemetery, where the nonprofit Memorial Day Flowers Foundation has placed flowers on graves since 2011. That first year, the organization had enough money to buy flowers for 10,000 of some 300,000 headstones.
In 2023, the foundation announced that it could afford flowers for only half of the graves. But last-minute donations and help from the floral industry, according to Stars and Stripes, likely ensuring a flower for each grave.
“We are so grateful to the American public and the generosity of our floral importers, who are literally donating thousands of flowers by the pallet, to ensure our fallen military heroes are honored this year,” said Ramiro Penaherrera, executive director of the foundation.
Thousands of volunteers place the flowers on the Arlington graves on Flowers of Remembrance Day, the Sunday before Memorial Day.
Hannah “Mom” Royer and husband, Lester, the founders of Connells Maple Lee’s sister company in Pennsylvania.
Her friends called her “Hanny” or “Beckie” back in 1922 when Hannah Sherman of Myerstown, Lebanon County, was a senior at Elizabethtown College near Lancaster, Pa.
Born in 1901, Hannah was a member of the college’s Homerian Literary Society, participated in chorus and glee club, played tennis and baseball.
“What can be more pleasing than a young lady who is virtuous and adorned with womanly graces?” read the text beneath her senior photo in the Etonian yearbook. “She is always pleasant and scatters sunshine wherever she goes.”
Hannah was pursuing a two-year “pedagogical course” to become a teacher at a time when mandatory school attendance laws were driving demand for educators and providing a new career opportunity for women.
‘She will bring joy’
“We predict for her a successful future, for we know that her whole heart will be in her work, whatever it may be,” the yearbook concluded, “and she will bring joy into the lives of the friends she meets.”
Hannah would become a first-grade teacher, marry classmate Lester Royer of Black Rock, Md., and raise a family. She would assume a new nickname, “Mom,” and prove the Etonian remarkably prescient.
But teaching wasn’t her true calling. Hannah, whose remarkable life would see her to age 96, would put her whole heart into the floral business. Her enduring legacy is Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts and sister company Royer’s Flowers & Gifts in Pennsylvania, which together constitute one of the most successful flower shops in American history.
Hannah and Lester, a high school biology teacher, married in 1925 and had their first child in 1929, the year of the stock market crash and the start of the Great Depression. By 1937, they had three children and were living on Lester’s salary alone.
Both Hannah and Lester, known as “Pop,” had grown up on farms. At their Lebanon home, they grew enough produce to help feed their family and sell some to neighbors for additional income.
Their son Ken, in his book “Retailing Flowers Profitably,” said Hannah “expanded our crop selection to include African violets, which she grew on her windowsills.
“The violets were sold at first by our next-door neighbor, who worked in a garment factory in Lebanon … . The addition of violets made our business a year-round enterprise rather than a summer-only produce business.”
Patient and persistent
Ken, who would follow his parents into the family floral business, noted that his mother started selling flowers at local farmers markets, refusing to let the initially tepid response wilt her will. Hannah, whom Ken described as patient and persistent, kept going back until business picked up.
“I have often reflected on this sequence and decided that my mother’s decision to go back after that first dismal experience was probably the most important event in the development of the business we now enjoy,” Ken wrote.
By 1945, having fielded requests for cut flowers, Mom Royer concluded that she needed training in floral arranging. Off she went to a two-week course in Gloucester, Mass.
Upon her return, the family converted the two-car garage behind its house into the South Side Flower Shop. The store operated from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday, but after-hours customers could summon Hannah with a bell that rang in the family home.
Lester ultimately would join the business full-time, operating the greenhouses while Hannah ran the retail store.
Lester was a lay minister in their church, which Ken said was “always his first love. Business was not a source of inspiration or an emotional stimulation to him. Mom was the driving force behind the business.”
Hannah and Lester sold the business, renamed Royer’s Flowers, to their sons Ken and Glenn in the 1950s. With three stores in the Columbus area and 16 stores in south-central and eastern Pennsylvania, the business remains under family ownership.
Ken’s sons Greg, who is chairman, and Tom, president and CEO, represent the third generation. They were later joined by Greg’s sons Andrew and Geoff, who serve as vice presidents. More of the fourth generation is waiting in the wings as cousins Tommy Royer and Evan Royer are pursuing business degrees in college with plans of joining the family business.
To put that into perspective, according to the Conway Center for Family Business in Columbus, only 3 percent of family businesses operate at the fourth-generation level and beyond.
Mother’s Day comes but once a year, but every day that Connells Maple Lee and Royer’s operate is a celebration of the legacy of Hannah “Mom” Royer.
Every spring, hundreds of thousands of high school students take college admission exams.
Many of the juniors and seniors also will partake of another rite of passage, one that’s a lot more fun than hours of testing: prom.
But will selecting prom flowers be:
Stressful
Confusing
Costly
None of the above
You can color in the oval next to D if you work with Connells Maple Lee Flowers & Gifts. We draw upon decades of helping high school students with prom prep. It’s quite possible that your parents or even your grandparents shopped for prom flowers with us when they were in school.
Whether you are attending prom with your significant other or with friends, flowers remain an integral part of the experience. We’re here to help you raise your flower-selection score.
Prom primer
Prom is short for promenade, which describes a leisurely walk or a place for walking but also movements in ballet and ballroom dancing, according to USA Today.
Proms were modeled after debutante balls in high society, with the first ones traced to colleges and universities in the Northeast in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They were formal events meant to teach etiquette and manners and featured waltzes and other formal dances.
By the 1930s, according to history.com, proms had reached high schools and began to look more like the events we know today. Amy Best, in her book, “Prom Night: Youth, Schools and Popular Culture,” said they became “a democratized version of the debutante ball.”
It gave anyone attending high school the sense that they, too, were making a formal entrance into society, “that they could transcend the boundaries of class,” Best wrote. “The message was that you did not have to be rich to wear a fancy frock, to be adorned with a corsage, or to waltz the night away.”
At Connells Maple Lee, we emphasize the specialness of prom and how flowers honor the people wearing them. We offer a wide selection of flowers, work with all budgets and are eager to discuss your specific needs.
Meanwhile, here are some things to keep in mind:
Corsages and boutonnieres
These are the traditional prom favorites. Women typically wear a corsage, which is taken from the French “bouquet de corsage,” or flowers pinned to the upper part of the body. As spaghetti straps and strapless dresses become popular, the corsage moved to the wrist, to which it is tied.
Men often wear boutonnieres, also of French origin, meaning buttonhole. The boutonniere doesn’t go in the buttonhole but rather is pinned above it with the stem down.
Hand-held bouquets
Of late, the corsage’s popularity is being challenged by the hand-held bouquet, which has become a darling of TikTok. We’ve added more options to our lineup to capture what students are looking for. Something to consider is that while a hand-held bouquet can make a statement in photos, it may not be something a date wants to hold onto all night.
Complementary colors
Dresses come in an array of designer colors that aren’t always available in fresh-cut flowers. You can save yourself a lot of aggravation by picking complementary rather than aiming for an exact match.
Perhaps you don’t want the flowers to be as bold as the dress color. Consider tints or shades of the dress color: for instance, purple, lavender, magenta or orchid.
Contrasting colors
If you want a bold look, consider contrasting colors that also are complementary. These are opposites on the color wheel that provide a nice pop: for instance, red and green, yellow and purple, orange and blue.
A nod to neutral
When in doubt, you can always stay neutral. The fact is that all-white continues to be our most popular corsage year after year, often accented with silver or gold to match jewelry instead of dress color.
Our staff is always available to assist with your prom needs. Of course, decisions about prom flowers come down to what you like and what your budget allows.
When you choose what’s appropriate for your prom experience, there are no wrong answers.
Exercise, eat healthy, get plenty of sleep. These are among the most common means of practicing self-care, even if many of us struggle to achieve them daily.
Did you know that an even easier way to boost your physical and mental health is by including flowers in your everyday life? Academic researchers have linked flowers to happiness.
“Flowers aren’t just for making emotional statements at holidays or milestone moments,” said CEO Tom Royer. “Having them around on a regular basis improves our mental and emotional health.”
Researchers have noted that flowers can be a source of pleasure. Flowers are known to trigger the release of “happy” brain chemicals dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin.
While flowers won’t replace working out or eating well, they are beneficial to self-care.
Researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey conducted a 10-month study of participants’ behavioral and emotional response to receiving flowers. Their report, “An Environmental Approach to Positive Emotion: Flowers,” found that flowers improve mood, help people make deep connections, and have an immediate positive effect on happiness.
On the heels of the Rutgers study, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the “Home Ecology of Flowers.”
The research found that people living with flowers reported increased feelings of compassion and kindness toward others. By placing flowers in high visibility areas of their home, participants reported feeling less anxiety and worry.
Happiness at home carried over to the workplace where the individuals were happier and felt more enthusiasm and energy.
