A group of children will be a little warmer this winter thanks to the Southgate Rotary Club.

Along with the community, the club collected hats and mittens to be distributed to The Guidance Center’s Head Start students.

“The children ages 3 to 5 need our assistance this winter in keeping warm and healthy,” Rotary member Frances Waszkiewicz said.

The club held its annual holiday luncheon Dec. 2 at the Holiday Inn-Southgate to present the donated hats and mittens to Guidance Center representatives.

Taylor and Allen Park Rotary Club members joined them for the festivities. Also present were Southgate Mayor Joseph Kuspa, schools Supt. Nancy Nagle and other city officials.

The Southgate Anderson High School choir entertained the group with holiday songs to get everyone in the spirit.

Angela Pilarski, director of Head Start at the Guidance Center, accepted the donations.

“She was very moved and grateful for the generosity of the community and thanked everyone on behalf of their 1,600 families,” Waszkiewicz said.

A 50/50 raffle was held to benefit the Southgate Goodfellows.

Many businesses took part in the donation drive by placing drop-off boxes at their locations, including Southgate City Hall; the Downriver Family YMCA; The Guidance Center; Holiday Inn-Southgate; Traffic Jam Boutique; ReMax Realty; Bumgardner-Michniak-Parmenter & Associates; the Dental Office of Charles Zammit; Old Country Buffet; Mallie’s Sports Grill & Bar and Buffalo Wild Wings.

Allen Park Dental Care, Comcast’s Taylor and Garden City offices and Women Making Connections also collected items throughout the month.

The Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital Patient Accounting Department donated money to purchase items and the Fifth Third Bank branch in Riverview also contributed items to the drive.

By Catherine Arcure, for AnnArbor.com

That page-worn cookbook from the area’s thrift shop on your kitchen shelf or the recipe collection you turn to from a city’s Junior League share a powerful legacy. So demonstrates Jan Longone, an Ann Arborite, who was honored by the New York Public Library and the Culinary Historians of New York.

In a lecture following the presentation in New York City to Longone of the prestigious Amelia Award (honoring lifetime achievement in the field of culinary history), Longone traced the history of community charity cookbooks, showing how they have affected women’s rights and the political landscape in this country throughout the last 150 years.

Early charity cookbooks were among the first projects organized by groups of women, often with their church to garner support for projects they felt were important. Longone points out that these cookbooks came at a time when women were without rights, without meeting places outside the home and without any networks comparable to “the old boy network.” They had no vote, had no control of money, were given no business experience, so publishing a group cookbook represented a coming together of interests, of finding a way to organize to raise money to support causes of importance to them.

The cookbook production became a social phenomenon of the highest order, bringing women together in a new way that has continued to grow decade by decade. The desire to share recipes was there but an overriding hope was to promote their right to vote, to speak to equal rights for women, to raise money for soldiers injured in war or for other military, political, social or religious causes. It was the beginning step inthe establishment of the “Old Girl Network,” Longone asserts, and the empowerment of women.

Women’s right to vote was a major issue addressed in many of these early cookbooks. Longone has many examples in her collection. One, for instance, shows Uncle Sam on the cover, supposedly navigating the “Ship of State” with a makeshift wheel supported by a few straggling spokes representing those small number of states granting women the right to vote; A half spoke is part of the wheel, too, meant to symbolize the vote given in one state in which women could vote … but only in school board elections!

In various communities where cookbooks pleading for a woman’s right to vote were printed, celebrities of the area were often given a voice. Clara Barton (who later founded the Red Cross), for example, in an 1891 community cookbook of her town, says to men, “I have helped you when you were sick and wounded, now stand by me and give women a vote on the ballot.”

The community charity cookbook in the early years brought women together for a project that was their own and in which they organized themselves, sold advertising (often for goods that women made or wanted to sell), gave them business experience, made money and gave them a way to direct funds towards the causes they favored.

A 72-year effort is mirrored in these community cookbooks regarding a woman’s right to vote. Later these cookbooks took on issues such as temperance, buying bonds, supporting the military, and a concept called the Exchange. The Women’s Exchange was a women’s invention in the late 1880s and supported a place in many communities and large cities, where women could bring handiwork (from jellies to embroidery) or other items to sell. These exchanges existed for decades and often had a luncheon area where women could meet, Longone explains, noting how these cookbooks, used to found the Exchanges, were a start of women’s clubs, “The Old Girl Network” and the empowerment of women.

Women’s groups representing churches or synagogues through their cookbooks brought in and continue to bring in substantial amounts of money to support their projects. A Milwaukee cookbook, "The Way to a Man’s Heart” first published by the women of a Jewish temple there in 1901 to raise money for a Jewish settlement house, and is now in its 30th edition and its growth supports all charities in Milwaukee. She notes that in this book, the support for the cause continues although the recipes have changed: in 1901, the recipe for green beans called for them to be cooked for 1-3 hours; today’s version suggests simply 10-15 minutes.

Another that continues today was started in 1903 to save artifacts and preserve landmarks in Southern California. Others were started in support of the New Deal. Those cookbooks supporting temperance were often concerned about that issue as those publishing them believed that women and children were the most affected by intemperance and the abuse of alcohol and used the charity cookbook to emphasize this. The community charity cookbook provided a way for women to support women and make clear their views on issues that affected politics, even constitutional amendments.

The community cookbook and the culinary history of American has been of long-standing interest to Longone. She and her husband, Dan, are proprietors of the Wine and Food Library in Ann Arbor, America’s oldest antiquarian culinary bookshop. Her collection is considered one of the foremost of culinary Americana and has now been generously donated to the Clements Library on the University of Michigan campus, where she is the first person to ever be given the position of Curator of American Culinary History. The extensive collection is now a part of the Longone Center for American Culinary Research and is a mecca for all those studying American culinary history. Longone describes its scope as “everything that influenced and influences America and everything that America influenced or influences in culinary matters.”

Her passion for American culinary history has also led to Longone’s involvement in other projects including Michigan State University’s “Feeding America” website, which digitizes and makes available hundreds of culinary primary sources to anyone with internet access. She has organized two national symposia on American culinary history, bringing together scholars for a unique exchange of ideas. She writes and lectures widely and is an associate editor of the “Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America,” an advisory board member of “Gastromica,” a quarterly journal for the scholarly study of food and food issues. She is also the recipient of the national Food Arts Silver Spoon Award.

Catherine Arcure, is the former food writer of the Ann Arbor News. She now lives in New York City where she manages her businesses: Manhattan Manners, etiquette training for children and young adults; and The Protocol Professional, etiquette training for businesses and organizations.

Attorney Ryan M. Kelly, Associate at Kelly & Kelly, P.C., has been named a “Rising Star” in the area of Michigan Family Law by Super Lawyers magazine. This marks the 2^nd straight year Ms. Kelly has received this honorable distinction.

Attorney Michele D. Kelly, Senior Partner at Kelly & Kelly, P.C.,  was the speaker at the Michigan State Bar annual “Solo and Small Firm Institute” on the topic of “Underage Drinking” and “Handling Minor in Possession Cases.”

Finally, I heeded her advice. After 60 minutes alongside her well-loved Priscilla Patrick VHS, spent mostly staring at the ceiling or contemplating a nap on the living room floor, I swore it off and exclusively stuck to soccer.

What my mom deemed powerfully transcendent, I wrote off as impossibly boring. Eventually, I would come to understand all the “staring at the ceiling” as the practice of gentle meditation, an important practice of nearly all walks of yoga.

A few years after the first (and, up until that point, only) yoga incident, a friend gifted me a certificate to Best Buy, where I found myself mulling over Denise Austin’s Power Yoga Plus. I reluctantly purchased it, and popped it in the DVD player.

Unlike the last experience, that video turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable 20-minute experience. I even felt invigorated afterward. That little DVD stayed with me all throughout college, helping me through many a stressful exam cramming study period. Yet, after a while, I still wanted more.

A bachelor’s degree and 25 pounds later, I began to explore different branches of yoga, extending anywhere from Kundalini to Ashtanga. Initially the motivation had been weight loss, but eventually it became more than that.

Although I’d already been teaching PIYO (a combination of pilates and yoga) for close to a year, my quest for something more eventually led me to a YogaFIT workshop. The workshop was packed with all different sorts of people: seasoned and new instructors alike, college students, wellness center workers and individuals who simply sought to improve their own private practices.

Not a moment went wasted. When we weren’t learning about ways to structure a vinyasa style session (often known as flow-yoga) or how to incorporate transformational language (to positively and peacefully guide students through the session), we were practicing proper alignment of the body in each pose and leading each other through mock sessions. Needless to say, we were all sore from practicing our fill of planks, crocodiles and warriors.

By the end of the workshop, what resonated with me the most was more so metaphysical than purely physical. The workshop instructor gave a wonderful interpretation of the meaning behind the word “namaste” (often said at the very end of a yoga session) and what it really means to practice yoga.

In the words of this particular instructor, “namaste” is a greeting with depth, much like “aloha” or “shalom” expressing that “the goodness and humanity in me recognizes the goodness and humanity in you.”

Unlike many other forms of physical and mental fitness, yoga is unique because the primary focus is neither competition nor meeting expectations. Instead, emphasis is placed on making each session, whether alone or in a class, a positive, individual experience reflective of the mind and body’s present state.

On days where we experience more aches and pains than usual, a session might be slower paced and filled with postural modifications not normally inserted on days where the body is free of them.

Another workshop classmate said it best, stating “You can practice yoga by simply stepping on a mat and taking a few breaths.”

The point my instructor was trying to make is that, “namaste” does not necessarily need to be chanted throughout your practice (especially if chanting is uncomfortable for you), and it’s not necessarily about contorting yourself into acrobatical positions. What it really aims to communicate is the importance of acknowledging feelings of compassion toward your own self and towards those around you. By striving to find that, you are being true to the nature of yoga, no matter the mental or physical path down which your practice takes you that day.

Whether you’re indoors or outdoors, feeling at your best or at your worst, restricted to an office chair or in a professional studio with mats, a soccer player like me, or simply looking for a way to further improve your own health, yoga is a practice that can be implemented on a daily basis and one that can benefit many different people.

If you are looking to improve your practice or are ready to make the move towards becoming an instructor, attending a yoga-centered workshop is a great option. I encourage you to explore the many vast varieties around and stick with what feels best for your body.

~Namaste

Delfina Bonilla-Cassel is the founder of EnForma Fit LLC and an ACE Certified Personal Trainer and yoga instructor. Her motto is "Shaping the best you, one workout at a time." Visit her website or blog, or find her on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.