LYNN FLORIST

Valentine's Day, on February 14th, is the traditional day on which lovers in the West let each other know about their love. Originally an ancient Catholic Church feast day in honor of Saint Valentine, it probably became associated with romantic love in the Middle Ages.

A dinner date on Valentine's Day is often regarded as indicating that a dating couple are involved in a serious relationship.

Christmas is a traditional holiday in the Christian calendar which takes place around the end of December and celebrates the nativity of Jesus Christ. Christmas is also celebrated as a secular holiday throughout much of the world. The precise date of the birth & historicity of Jesus are hotly debated. The word "Christmas" is often abbreviated to "Xmas", the "X" being an uppercase Greek letter chi, which is the first letter of "Christos" in Greek. The abbreviation is widely but not universally accepted; some view it as demeaning to the name of Christ.

The traditional Christmas flower is the poinsettia.

Easter is a Christian holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead three days after his crucifixion on Good Friday and marking the end of the Lent. Easter is the holiest day in the Christian calendar, followed by Christmas and is recognized as a legal holiday in most countries with a significant Christian tradition, with the notable exception of the United States where Easter is only celebrated on Easter Sunday (and not also on Easter Monday).

Father's Day is supposed to be a day to celebrate fatherhood and parenting by males, as Mother's Day celebrates motherhood and mothering.

Father's Day is celebrated in many countries around the world, but not always on the same day.

In the United States, Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, a public holiday celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is commonly associated with fireworks displays, barbecues, picnics and other public celebratory events.

Halloween is a holiday that is based around embracing scary things, particularly those involving death, the undead, "evil" magic, and mythical monsters. It is a liminal or threshold occasion, when the distinctions between the daylight world of reason and the spectral nightworld are blurred.

Commonly-associated Halloween "characters" include ghosts, witches, black cats, goblins, banshees, zombies, and demons, as well as certain literary figures such as Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.

Black and orange are the traditional colors of Halloween. There are also elements of the autumn season reflected in symbols of Halloween, such as pumpkins and scarecrows.

Before the 20th century, this holiday was a relatively minor one. However, with the rise of Christmas as the biggest holiday in the Western world and the establishment of the modern state of Israel, this holiday began to increasingly serve both as a celebration of Israel's struggle for survival and more importantly, as a December family gift giving holiday which could be a Jewish substitute for the Christian one. It is important to note that the view of Chanukah as a replacement for Christmas is not universally held, and many Jews do not place this extra significance on an otherwise relatively mundane holiday.

Mother's Day in the United States was first proclaimed in 1870 in Boston by Julia Ward Howe, and Howe called for it to be observed each year nationally in 1872. As originally envisioned, Howe's "Mother's Day" was a call for Pacifism and disarmament by women. Early "Mother's Day" was mostly marked by women's peace groups. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War.

In 1907 Mother's Day was first celebrated in a small private way by Anna Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate the anniversary of her mother's death two years earlier on May 9, 1905. Jarvis's mother, also named Anna Jarvis, had been active in Mother's Day campaigns for peace and worker's safety and health. The younger Jarvis launched a quest to get wider recognition of Mother's Day. The celebration organized by Jarvis on May 10, 1908 involved 407 children with their mothers at the Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton. The following campaign to recognize Mother's Day was financed by clothing merchant John Wanamaker. As the custom of Mother's Day spread, the emphasis shifted from the pacificism and reform movements to a general appreciation of mothers. The first official recognition of the holiday was by West Virginia in 1910. A proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day was signed by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson on May 14, 1914.

A tradition calls for the wearing of carnations on Mother's Day-a red one if one's mother is alive, and white if she has died.

The New Year is an event that happens when a culture celebrates the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Cultures that measure yearly calendars all have New Year celebrations.

In the United States, cultural images include an old Father Time with a sash proclaiming the Old Year leaving as an infant with a sash proclaiming the New Year enters.

Saint Patrick's Day is celebrated worldwide by those of Irish descent and increasingly by people of other ethnicities as well, notably in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and North America.

Thanksgiving is a holiday celebrated in North America, generally observed as an expression of gratitude. The most common view of its origin is that it was to give thanks to God for the bounty of the autumn harvest. In the United States, the holiday is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. In Canada, where the harvest generally ends earlier in the year, the holiday is celebrated on the second Monday in October, which is observed as Columbus Day in the United States.