Mother's Day

Mother's Day
Observed by	Many countries
Type	Historical
Date	Varies regionally
Related to	Father's Day

Mother's Day is a day honoring mothers, celebrated on various days in many places around the world. It complements Father's Day, the celebration honoring fathers.

History

Different countries celebrate Mother's Day on various days of the year because the day has a number of different origins.

One school of thought claims this day emerged from a custom of mother worship in ancient Greece, which kept a festival to Cybele, a great mother of Greek gods. This festival was held around the Vernal Equinox around Asia Minor and eventually in Rome itself from the Ides of March (15 March) to 18 March.

The ancient Romans also had another holiday, Matronalia, that was dedicated to Juno, though mothers were usually given gifts on this day.

In addition to Mother's Day, International Women's Day is celebrated in many countries, most often on March 8th.

Spelling

In 1912, Anna Jarvis trademarked the phrases "second Sunday in May" and "Mother's Day."

"She was specific about the location of the apostrophe; it was to be a singular possessive, for each family to honour their mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world."

This is also the spelling used by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson on the law making official the holiday on the U.S., by U.S. Congress on bills, and by other U.S. President on their declarations.

Common usage in English language also dictates that the ostensibly singular possessive "Mother's Day" is the preferred spelling.

United States

A selection of handmade Mother's Day gifts.

North America celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother's Day was inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace.

Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mother's Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.

Frank E. Hering, President of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, made the first known public plea for "a national day to honor our mothers" in 1904.

When Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. In 1907, she passed out 500 white carnations at her mother’s church, St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia—one for each mother in the congregation. The first Mother's Day service was celebrated on 10 May 1908, in the same church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Anna chose Sunday to be Mother's Day because she intended the day to be commemorated and treated as a Holy Day.

Originally the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of the original Mother's Day commemoration, where Anna handed out carnations, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on—spreading eventually to 46 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912, beginning with West Virginia. On May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day and requesting a proclamation. On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made that proclamation, declaring the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Carnations have come to represent Mother's Day, since they were delivered at one of its first celebrations by its founder. This also started the custom of wearing a carnation on Mother's Day. A colored flower, usually red, indicates the person's mother is living, and a white flower that she is not. The founder, Anna Jarvis, gave a different meaning to the colors. She only delivered a single white carnation to every person, a symbol of the purity of a mother's love.

In May 2008, the US House of Representatives voted twice on a resolution commemorating Mother's Day, , the first one being unanimous so that all congressmen would be on record showing support for Mother's Day.^{[citation needed]}

Commercialization

Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become and spent all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.

Later commercial and other exploitations of the use of Mother's Day infuriated Anna and she made her criticisms explicitly known throughout her time. She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the comercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control ...".

Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother's Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.

For example, according to IBISWorld, a publisher of business research, Americans will spend approximately $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts—like spa treatments—and another $68 million on greeting cards.

Mother's Day will generate about 7.8% of the U.S. jewelry industry's annual revenue in 2008. Americans are expected to spend close to $3.51 billion in 2008 on dining out for Mother's Day, with brunch and dinner being the most popular dining out options.

Gregorian dates for Mothering Sunday

2004	21 March
2005	6 March
2006	26 March
2007	18 March
2008	2 March
2009	22 March
2010	14 March
2011	3 April
2012	18 March
2013	10 March
2014	30 March
2015	15 March
2016	6 March

Mother's Day holiday, in the United States and Canada, celebrates motherhood generally and the positive contributions of mothers to society. It falls on the second Sunday of each May. It is the result of a campaign by Anna Marie Jarvis (1864–1948), who, following the death of her mother on May 9, 1905, devoted her life to establishing Mother's Day as a national, and later an international, holiday. The first observances of both Mother's Day and Father's Day were held in the state of West Virginia.

Precursors to the American Mother's Day

Precedents for the currently observed "Mother's Day" include:

• "Mothering Sunday" in the UK and Ireland is on the fourth Sunday of Lent. It was originally a time when Catholics were supposed to travel to attend Mass in their "Mother Church" (the regional cathedral) rather than in their local parish. By the Reformation, it had changed into an occasion for children to visit parents. An 1854 source mentions a couplet: "On 'Mothering Sunday,' above all other/Every child should dine with its mother."

• "Mother's Day Work Clubs" organized by Anna Jarvis's mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (1832-1905), to improve sanitation and health in the area. These clubs also assisted both Union and Confederate encampments controlling a typhoid outbreak, and conducted a "Mothers' Friendship Day" to reconcile families divided by the Civil War.

• The "Mother's Day" anti-war observances founded by Julia Ward Howe in 1872

Both are sometimes claimed as the "founder of Mother's Day," implying that Julia Ward Howe's June 2nd occasion and Anna Jarvis' second-Sunday-in-May event are one in the same. It is even suggested that an anti-war and feminist holiday was co-opted by the forces of sentimentality, tradition, and Hallmark Cards. But although Mother's Day was celebrated in eighteen cities in 1873, it did not take root. It continued in Boston for about ten years under Howe's personal financial sponsorship, then died out.

Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day, celebrated on June 2nd, was first proclaimed around 1870 by Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation, 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. See Mother's Day Proclamation.

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.

The first known observance of Mother's Day in the U.S. occurred in Albion, Michigan, on May 13, 1877, the second Sunday of the month. According to local legend, Albion pioneer, Juliet Calhoun Blakeley, stepped up to complete the sermon of the Rev. Myron Daughterty, who was distraught because an anti-temperance group had forced his son and two other temperance advocates to spend the night in a saloon and become publicly drunk. In the pulpit, Blakeley called on other mothers to join her. Blakeley's two sons, both travelling salesmen, were so moved that they vowed to return each year to pay tribute to her and embarked on a campaign to urge their business contacts to do likewise. At their urging, in the early 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Albion set aside the second Sunday in May to recognize the special contributions of mothers.

On February 4, 1904, South Bend, Indiana resident Frank E. Hering made the first Public Plea and started his own campaign for a national observance of "Mother's Day" in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Jarvis's Mother's Day

In 1907, Mother's Day was first celebrated in a small, private way by Anna Marie Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate the anniversary of her mother's death two years earlier on May 9, 1905. Jarvis's mother, named Anna Maria Reeves Jarvis, had been active in Mother's Day campaigns for peace and worker's safety and health since end of American Civil War. 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 Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton (this church is now the Mother's Day Shrine]). Grafton is, thus, the place recognized as the birthplace of Mother's Day.

The subsequent 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 pacifism 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

Dates around the world

Mother's Day is celebrated on different days throughout the world. Examining the trends in Google searches for the term "mother's day" shows two primary results, the smaller one on the fourth Sunday in Lent (it is also called ladies day and women's day), and the larger one on the second Sunday in May.

The extent of the celebrations varies greatly. In some countries, it is potentially offensive to one's mother not to mark Mother's Day. In others, it is a little-known festival celebrated mainly by immigrants, or covered by the media as a taste of foreign culture (compare the celebrations of Diwali in the UK and the United States).

International history and traditions

In most countries, Mother's Day is a recent observance derived from the holiday as it has evolved in North America and Europe. Many African countries adopted the idea of one Mother's Day from the British tradition, although there are many festivals and events celebrating mothers within the many diverse cultures on the African continent that long pre-date colonization.

United Kingdom and Ireland

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Mothering Sunday, also called "Mother's Day," falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent (exactly three weeks before Easter Sunday). It is believed to have originated from the 16th century Christian practice of visiting one's mother church annually, which meant that most mothers would be reunited with their children on this day. Most historians believe that young apprentices and young women in servitude were released by their masters that weekend in order to visit their families. As a result of secularisation, it is now principally used to show appreciation to one's mother, although it is still recognised in the historical sense by some churches, with attention paid to Mary the mother of Jesus Christ as well as the traditional concept 'Mother Church'.

Mothering Sunday can fall at the earliest on 1 March (in years when Easter Day falls on 22 March) and at the latest on 4 April (when Easter Day falls on 25 April).

Mothering Sunday is essentially equivalent to Mother's Day, which latter name is also increasingly used, but this is a recent development, and its history is quite different.

Mothering Sunday did not begin as a celebration of motherhood, but a synonym of Laetare Sunday in the Christian liturgical calendar. During the sixteenth century, people returned to their "mother church" for a service to be held on the fourth Sunday of Lent. This was either a large local church, or more often the nearest Cathedral. Anyone who did this was commonly said to have gone "a-mothering," although whether this preceded the term Mothering Sunday is unclear. It was often the only time that whole families could gather together, if prevented by conflicting working hours.

The Epistle for the fourth Sunday in Lent as set out in the Book of Common Prayer gives a special place to the theme of maternal love: Galatians 4:26 states that "Jerusalem which is above is free; which is Mother of us all."

The other names attributed to this festival include Simnel Sunday, Refreshment Sunday and Rose Sunday. Simnel Sunday is named after the practice of baking Simnel cakes to celebrate the reuniting of families during the austerity of Lent. Because there is traditionally a lightening of Lenten vows on this particular Sunday in celebration of the fellowship of family and church, the lesser-used label of Refreshment Sunday is also used, although rarely today.

Rose Sunday is sometimes used as an alternative title for Mothering Sunday as well, as is witnessed by the purple robes of Lent being replaced in some churches by rose-coloured ones. This title refers to the tradition of posies of flowers being collected and distributed at the service originally to all the mothers, but latterly to all women in the congregation.^{[citation needed]} The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, however, asserts that "the Golden Rose, sent by the Popes to Catholic sovereigns, used to be blessed at this time, and for this reason the day was sometimes called 'Dominica de Rosa'."

This Sunday was also once known as "the Sunday of the Five Loaves," from the traditional Gospel reading for the day. Prior to the adoption of the modern "common" lectionaries, the Gospel reading for this Sunday in the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Western-Rite Orthodox, and Old Catholic churches was the story of the feeding of the five thousand (for instance, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer stipulates St John's Gospel 6:5-14).

Another tradition associated with Mothering Sunday is the practice of "clipping the church," whereby the congregation form a ring around their church building and, holding hands, embrace it.

For some Church of England churches, it is the only day in Lent when marriages can be celebrated.

In later times, Mothering Sunday became a day when domestic servants were given a day off to visit their mother and other family members.

Mothering Sunday remains in the calendar of some Canadian Anglican churches, particularly those with strong English connections.

Japan

Mother's Day in Japan was initially commemorated during the Shōwa period as the birthday of Empress Kōjun (mother of Emperor Akihito). Nowadays - as in the United States - the holiday is a heavily marketed concept, and people typically give flowers such as carnations and roses as gifts.

China

In China, in recent years some people began to advocate for the official adoption of Mother's Day in memory of Meng Mu, the mother of Mèng Zǐ. It remains an unofficial festival, except in a small number of cities. ^{[citation needed]}

Greece

Mother's Day in Greece corresponds to the Eastern Orthodox feast day of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. Since the Theotokos (The Mother of God) appears prominently in this feast as the one who brought Christ to the Temple at Jerusalem, this feast is associated with mothers. ^{[citation needed]}

Iran

Celebrated on 20 Jumada al-thani, the birthday anniversary of Hazrat Fatemeh Zahra (SA), the beloved daughter of Prophet Mohammad. It was changed after the Iranian revolution, the reason having been theorized as trying to undercut feminist movements and promoting role models for the traditional model of family. It was previously 25 Azar on Iranian calendar during the shah era ^{[citation needed]}

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Rathjen, Lelinda (2008). Ideals Mother's Day. Nashville, Tenn.: Ideals Publications.

ISBN 978-0824913182

• Schmidt, Leigh Eric (1995). Consumer Rites: The Buying & Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691029801

External links

• International Mother's Day Shrine
• Mother's Day History

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Mother's_Day  ^history
• Mothering_Sunday  ^history
• Mother's_Day_(North_America)  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Mother's Day"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.