Mother’s Day: time to honor mothers and boost the economy
FLOWERS are synonymous with Mother’s Day.
Photo by Shamblen Studios
The earliest known version of this holiday dates to 250 B.C. Ancient Romans threw a spring festival to honor Cybele, the mother of all gods. The celebration, involving games, masquerades and hijinks, is also credited with being a precursor to April Fools’ Day. Similarly, Greeks had a holiday to honor Rhea, their mother goddess.
Another precursor to the modern Mother’s Day began in the 1600s. England celebrated “Mothering Sunday,” the fourth Sunday during Lent, when parishioners returned to their “mother church,” where they had been baptized, for a special service. Over time, secular activities overtook the sacred, and the holiday became family focused. Children customarily gave their mothers flowers and gifts on that day.
In the U.S., Mother’s Day was first celebrated in West Virginia in 1908, after Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, who missed her own deceased mother, began a letter-writing campaign to establish the holiday. By 1911 all the states adopted Mother’s Day. On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother’s Day a national holiday and set it on the second Sunday in May.
The holiday gained traction internationally as well, although the dates and traditions vary from country to country. The United Kingdom still celebrates Mothering Sunday, but many European countries fete mothers on March 8, International Women’s Day. In Iran, mothers are celebrated on the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed’s only daughter, Fatimah, who is considered a role model for Muslim women. Taiwan’s Mother’s Day falls on the same Sunday as ours, but it’s a double holiday, as it’s designated as the Buddha’s birthday as well. Moms are celebrated, but the population also participates in the Bathing Buddha Festival, when statues of Buddha are washed, as mothers wash their newborns. In Thailand children kneel at their mother’s feet on August 12 to show fealty and appreciation. In North Korea the holiday is political, occurring on the anniversary of the speech made by the country’s leader in 1961, “The Duty of Mothers in the Education of the Children.” In 1973, South Korea folded dads into the day. The family gets together and gives red carnations to both parents. For years Israel held two different Mother’s Days in honor of two different women of valor. They were eventually combined and in the 1990s, the holiday was redesigned as “Family Day.” In Indonesia, all women, not just mothers, are honored on Women’s Day every December 22. That date marks the first Indonesian Women’s Congress in 1928, which launched the women’s movement in that country.
In this country, Mother’s Day is the third most popular holiday, following only Christmas and Easter, and we show it with gifts, brunches, flowers and phone calls. Every Mother’s Day over 122 million phone calls are placed to our moms. (Interestingly, dads get a fair number of phone calls on Father’s Day, but until the world switched from landlines to primarily cell phones, roughly 30% of them came in “collect!”) On average, 23 million flowers are sold for moms, totaling $3 billion worth of bouquets. It is estimated that 68% of us take our moms out for a meal on her day. By far the most common way to celebrate our mothers is with a card: we buy more than $1.1 billion worth of Mother’s Day cards every year. In all, our love and appreciation adds up to $35.7 billion spent on honoring our moms.
Which brings us to a sad truth. Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis, who worked so hard to win a day for mothers (and never had children of her own), became disgusted with its commercialization and spent the rest of her life fighting to rescind the holiday.
Category: Entertainment
