The Really Big Picture: Team Mums
Told in reverse chronological order, welcome to the backstory of “team mums,” aka mums that are larger than life.
February 2024: The (new) Official World’s Largest Homecoming Mum
On February 20, 2024, Guinness World Records spoke. Click here to find out which mum created in 2023 is the world record-holder for the Largest Homecoming Mum.
2023: Team Mums
A number of high schools across Texas rallied students and teachers in 2023 to build really, really, really, really big mums. Here are some examples that made the local news and circulated through social media:
How do they measure up? Dickinson High School floral design class II (28 ft) 2023; Queen City High School (11 ft) 2023; Morton Ranch High School, Katy (20 ft) 2023; Princeton High School advanced floral class (18 ft) 2023; Midland High School (10 ft) 2023, Oak Ridge High School (200 ft) 2023; Caddo Mills High School floral design class (20 ft) 2023; Lewisville High School (37.5 ft); 2023, Devine High School floral design class (39 ft) 2023; Warren Sanchez High School San Antonio 202?; Edcouch-Elsa High School 202?; Memorial High School Library, McAllen (two floors high) 2023; Mount Pleasant High School 2023.
Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that these homecoming mums are in a fundamentally different category than their human-sized counterparts. Instead of trying to come up with the perfect synonym for “really, really, really, really big” to describe them, focus on what makes them unique and special.
What makes these mums unique is that they’re built to be displayed, not worn. What makes them special is that they have a calling. Their calling is to instill pride and team spirit, and they do that by bringing people together to create them. They are Team Mums.
For example:
Students in a welding class make the frame; students in a floral design or fashion design class create the design; marketing students get out the word; sponsors and community members pitch in for materials; cheerleaders support the launch; and the entire school celebrates its unveiling.
The inclusive nature of a mum project at this scale harkens back to the glory days of homecoming parades. The more people who get involved, the more successful the outcome. The more successful the outcome, the more people get involved.
“It’s bonding," Midland High senior Macie Drummond told NewsWest 9. "Nobody has made a big mum in school before, and so for us to just collaborate and talk about ideas and see it all come together was really nice."
“I loved it. I was so proud of it. It was so worth it," Princeton High School junior Upkar Kaur told NBC DFW. "Worth all the hot glue gun burns."
"We completely smashed it," Oak Ridge agriculture science teacher Ashley Wilson told the Houston Chronicle. "It was a really cool feeling. It brought tears to my eyes when it went up. Just to see all the kids and their hard works was such a neat thing."
These sentiments are why I call this category of homecoming mums “Team Mums” instead of, say, ginormously humungous megamums. Because for those involved in the Team Mum experience, the experience of the journey is at least as important as the destination.
There’s no telling where this mum tradition off-shoot might go from here, but I have pretty good idea of where team mums have been.
2022: Team Mums and Spirit Week
Two Texas high schools showed their up-sized spirit by building team mums as a part of their homecoming week festivities. While there may have been more team mums built in 2022, there was no detectable media frenzy as there was in 2023.
How do they measure up? Snyder High School (12 ft) in 2022; Stony Point High School, Round Rock (15.5 ft) in 2022.
2021: Guinness World Records Names the First “Largest Homecoming Mum”
… for THIS pink and white monster. It was created in 2021 by Sherry Hall and the Special Education Department of the Arlington Independent School District (AISD) in Arlington, Texas, USA.
To be named a Guinness World Record holder, there must be due diligence to verify the claim. So on August 16, 2021, Guinness confirmed and recorded this mum’s measurements at 119.18 ft² (22 feet high) and deemed it the Largest Homecoming Corsage (Mum).
Photo: aisd.net. Before you go any further, scroll back up and look at the Lewisville mum again. See a familiar braid of pink ribbon woven into the “skirt” of the mum? That was a gift from Arlington, presented in support of records that are meant to be broken.
What motivated Sherry and her colleagues to attempt the world’s largest homecoming mum? First, there’s the actual reason. Prior to 2021, Sherry and her colleagues launched an annual event to raise awareness for the fight against breast cancer. They created this gigantic mum to support the cause (the event continues to this day).
Second: the other possible source of inspiration for Sherry is just a theory (or IS IT?) about what happened during the two years proceeding it (see 2019 and 2020 below).
Also in 2021: Another Really, Really, Really, Really Big Mum
This 78-foot-long homecoming mum was created in 2021 by Nancy Madsen, Corpus Christi, TX
This 78-foot Texas homecoming mum was also created in 2021 and was NOT named an official Guinness World Record holder. Maybe the application got lost in the mail? Regardless, let’s bask in its glory and in the shade of its massive shadow.
When Nancy Madsen of Oh My Goodness Boutique in Corpus Christi, TX unveiled this mum, Texas Monthly reporter Taylor Prewitt said that this 300-pound mum could only be lifted by a construction crane. She also noted that Big Tex, mascot of the Texas State Fair, is 55-feet tall (of course) and would be dwarfed by this behemoth mum. I would pay to see a campy horror movie based on that face-off.
All kidding aside. Even Nancy’s mum, one that was clearly created for promotional purposes, was a team mum. According to the Texas Monthly story, Nancy needed help from her cousins to get the job done.
Could all mums be team mums at heart? School clubs and groups host DIY parties where they create mums to sell in support of their activities. Professional mum-makers sometimes rely on part-time employees or seasonal help to bring a mum to life. Even DIY-er moms, grandmothers, daughters, sometimes dads, and other Texans who create human-sized mums rarely craft in isolation.
Speaking of isolation…
2020: Cause and Ripple Effect
The year before Sherry and her team built their mum was the first and worst Covid year. While neither mums nor high school football went away that fall, there was (like everything else) nothing normal about the way either tradition was carried out.
At the end of that terrible 2020-21 academic year, we promised ourselves that in Fall 2021, by gosh, we were going to smash our memories of 2020, the year of isolation and deprivation. The implication? We were going to do more than just pick up where we had left off in 2019.
And, um, where was that exactly?
2019: WhataMum
In 2019, I had an incredible opportunity to serve as the Artist-in-Residence at the Arlington Museum of Art in Arlington, TX.
WhataMum at the Arlington Museum of Art, 2019. You can read more about my exhibit on my About page and you can buy my book at lots of places.
During my residency, I debuted my multi-media art exhibit called MUMENTOUS: The Upsizing of a Texas Tradition, which included sixty of my original photographs, many of which now appear in my book.
When MUMENTOUS first opened, the most attention-grabbing part of the exhibit was my interactive piece.
Within that piece, I included bleachers, astroturf that I painted to simulate football field hashmarks, and a chain linked fence. On the fence, the museum team and I hung over 100 homecoming mums which were lent to us by the actual Texans who wore them. Some mums came to us from as far as 100 miles away. Some dated back over 30 years.
When Whataburger, a fast-food favorite of Texans and sponsor of my exhibit, heard about the mum installation, they enthusiastically asked if they could contribute one of their own. Of course!
And with that, WhataMum instantly became the most attention-grabbing part of my exhibit.
Built by Clyde Watts and his team at Lone Star Parade Floats in Dallas, WhataMum was made of 1,250 flower heads, 50 drink cups, 100 fry containers, 300 feet of ribbon, 80 bracelets and key chains, 165 feet of feathered fringe, and took 120 hours to build. News outlets from local TV stations to MSN.com to Yahoo.News covered the weird and wonderful juxtoposition of an 18-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide salute to Texas homecoming mums in the foyer of an art museum.
2019-2023: A Series of Fortunate Events
Let’s recap. Of all the mums that were built after the Whataburger WhataMum debuted at the Arlington Museum of Art in 2019, only the Corpus Christi mum (2021) was created by a professional mum maker as a promotion for her business (rumor has it that the promotional nature of that mum is the reason it was not Guinness-qualified). ALL the other team mums were school-based projects, and the first of those 2021-23 school-based projects took place in Arlington ISD. Have I mentioned that the Arlington Museum of Art is located, oh, I don’t know, just a mile or two away from Sherry’s office? In other words…
Team mums might be on me.
Or maybe not…
2015: The OG Team Mum?
This could be the first team mum to be covered by the media as a news story. It was created in 2015 by Palo Duro High School in Amarillo. It measured 15 feet high and 55-inches at its widest point.
The Amarillo Globe-News covered the moment when Assistant Principal Chris Paddock celebrated the mum’s christening at a pep rally. The school claimed and the accompanying article suggested that Palo Duro had achieved a world record. I mean, it’s printed right there on the ribbons. It could very well have been the world record mum in 2015 or ever, but I talked to the fine folks at Guinness World Records who verified that their first official record-holder was Arlington ISD in 2021.
But who cares. Right? It’s still glorious. The Globe-News called it a Maxi-Mum, a term I wish I had thought of myself.
And with that, the search engines and accessible media archives hit a maxi-mum maxi-wall. But I didn’t.
1990s, aka B.F. (Before Facebook)
In a weird and wonderful “worlds collide” moment, I recently discovered that my good friend Monica knows professional mum-maker Teri, owner of Her Daughter’s Mums. Teri, an alumna of Trinity High School, makes mums for the Hurst-Euless-Bedford school district of North Texas. They met each other in the early 2000s when Monica served as Trinity High School’s dance and drill team director.
They both clearly remember that during that time, Trinity High School displayed a team mum every year at their homecoming pep rally, which was held in the gym. The mum hung from the basketball backboard (exactly like the Palo Duro High School mum) and, as Teri remembers it, was long enough to touch the floor.
“It was huge!” Monica recalled. “I started working at Trinity in 2002, and they hung it every year I was there. It was a relic! I remember hearing that it was from the 1990s. By the time I left Trinity in 2012, it wasn’t in the best shape.”
Mums Gone By
Trinity High School’s maxi-mum was a homecoming tradition for close to two decades, and yet there is no Googleable evidence of it. As I think about all the versions and variations of Texas homecoming mums through time, and how few of them I will ever see in a photograph, I ask you:
When a tree falls in a forest (a school builds a team mum) but nobody hears it (the media doesn’t cover it and nobody posted about it in social media), did it make a sound (ever really exist)?
Yes, I say. Yes, it did. Because it is recorded where it really counts: in the hearts and memories (and possibly yearbooks) of its alumni, teachers, staff, and fans.
If nothing else, that’s what I choose to believe.
Could there be other schools or organizations, in Texas or beyond, that have created team mums? Most likely. Can you help me find them? Let me know in the comments below or email me at mumentousbook@gmail.com.
Shameless Plug for Mumentous
If you enjoyed reading this, I think you’ll enjoy my book, Mumentous: Original Photos and Mostly-True Stories about Football, Glue Guns, Moms, and a Supersized High School Tradition that was Born Deep in the Heart of Texas.
You don’t have to take it from me. I have loads of independent reviews like this one scattered throughout my website:
“Mumentous will attract, delight, and surprise those who think it will be yet another coverage of motherhood alone…
Libraries and readers interested in women's history, literature, and especially regional probes of women's traditions and experiences will relish Mumentous for its lively celebrations of the Texan woman and the energy she brings to the playing field of women's literature and life...”
- Midwest Book Review and Donovan's Literary Services by D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer
