Sts. Joachim and St. Anne

Remember your grandparents on the Feast of St. Joachim and St. Anne! The REAL Grandparents DAY!

From Mary Reed Newland’s “The Year and Our Children”

St. Anne is the patroness of old clothes dealers, seamstresses, laceworkes, housekeepers, carpenters, turners, cabinetmakers, stablemen, and broommakers, and she is invoked against poverty and to find lost objects. Although the martyrology doesn’t say so, she must be the patronness of Grandmothers, and we love her for that because she we could never get along without our grandmothers. The children love to recall that if she was still there when the Christ Child learned to talk, He called her Grandmother. The nicest of her symbols we think is a cradle with the infant Virgin Mary in it.

From the Saint of the Day!
This is the “feast of grandparents.” It reminds grandparents of their responsibility to establish a tone for generations to come: They must make the traditions live and offer them as a promise to little children. But the feast has a message for the younger generation as well. It reminds the young that older people’s greater perspective, depth of experience and appreciation of life’s profound rhythms are all part of a wisdom not to be taken lightly or ignored.


We think the best way to honor the feast of St. Joachim and St. Anne is to do something lovely for grandparents. Little girls might dress their best dolls as the tiny Mary this day and lay them in flower bedecked cradles.

My mom was awesome at passing on the faith to us. A Christian all of her life, but a convert to Catholicism in her late teens, she was made sure to pass these things to us. And even though the Catholic High School she sacrificed to send us to did little to nurture or grow that faith (and in some ways was really an occasion for sin) both my sister and I found our way back to the faith as adults.

When mom passed on, one of the first purchases I made with some of the money mom left me was this statue of St. Anne and her daughter Mary.

I love it for a number of reasons – it is a good reminder that even Mary needed some loving guidance from her mother, it reminds me to provide loving guidance to my own children especially my daughters, and it is a nice reminder of what my mother did all her life for me and my sister and then later as a grandmother to all of her grandchildren.

St. Anne Links on Diigo.

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