Just Because It’s Mother’s Day
The reporter in me wants to take readers on a tour of how Mother’s Day came to be. We tend to think that traditional holidays must be at least a few centuries old. With the exception of Christmas and celebrating the New Year, most of our holidays are of more recent vintage.
Mother’s Day was officially declared a national holiday in 1914 by an act of Congress. It came decades after Julia Ward Howe, a peace activist and abolitionist, called on women in 1870 during the post-Civil War reconciliation period to “leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel…with each other…as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace.” The idea was enshrined as “Mother’s Peace Day” and was to be celebrated on June 2nd.
Two years earlier, Anna Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia (pictured below) started “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to not only promote post-Civil War reconciliation in the region as Howe did but to “teach women how to properly care for their children.”
It was Jarvis’s daughter, Anna Jarvis, who following her mother’s death in 1905 conceived of Mother’s Day as a way of honoring mothers for the sacrifice they made for their children. Anna Jarvis’s efforts attracted financial backing from John Wanamaker (the Philadelphia department store owner). In May 1908, she celebrated what is considered the first Mother’s Day at a Methodist Church (where she was a Sunday school teacher) in Grafton, West Virginia while the John Wanamaker store held a large celebration in a Philadelphia auditorium. (Some reports say it was held at the John Wanamaker store in Philadelphia.)
Jarvis sent 500 white carnations to the Philadelphia event because they were her mother’s favorite flower. From 1908 to 1914 she vigorously campaigned to have women recognized at the national level by making Mother’s Day a national holiday. She encouraged supporters to “wear a white carnation, take their mother to church, hold a family lunch or at the very least write a letter home.” She was reportedly elated when Congress made Mother’s Day an official holiday.
But after greeting card, flower and other companies jumped on the Mother’s Day bandwagon, Jarvis went from elation to outrage over what she called the “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermined with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.” By 1920 Jarvis was denouncing the commercialization of Mother’s Day and in what might be a precursor to cancel culture by urging people to stop buying flowers, cards, and candies.
She could not stem the tide of what she and others like her had so passionately worked to bring about. In the U.S. we spend $23 billion on Mother’s Day per year with $2.5 billion spent on greeting cards alone.
Today liberal activists are of course trying to redefine Mother’s Day to bring about change that fits their agenda. All American holidays, according to the left, are either not worthy of celebration or should be radically redefined as ‘less traditional’ (as in Be Less White).
Curiously, spring offers us three days of celebration which were started by the Left, namely Earth Day, May Day, and yes, considering its early roots, Mother’s Day.
Wokesters want to ‘reclaim the original intent of Mother’s Day’ as did Anna Jarvis up until her death in 1948. This article calls Hallmark out (no mention of canceling them) for their so-called ‘gendered stories’ that “does not include single mothers, nor incarcerated mothers…nor does the idyllic Mother’s Day storybook include queer mothers, mothers separated from their children through residential schools, missing mothers, mothers whose child will never be able to make them breakfast in bed.”
We could probably show that one can buy single mothers and queer mothers Mother’s Day cards at almost any store. I’m left scratching my head as to what ‘mothers separated from their children through residential schools’ actually means as well as what ‘mothers whose child will never be able to make them breakfast in bed’ points to. I could probably hazard a guess and so could readers. As it is now, I am overwhelmed by the variety of cards one might send on Valentine’s Day. Everyone is supposed to get a Valentine’s Day card now including the neighbor’s dog! So too Mother’s Day?
It should go without saying that buying things to show mom you care about her might be replaced with doing something meaningful. This is the same cudgel we have seen for decades during Lent. We are told: Don’t give up something (like chocolate), do something like volunteer at the local hospital. Well and good. It is hard to quibble with communities, for instance, that have adopted organized activities like Random Acts of Kindness Day or Beautification Day.
The pandemic provided the perfect opportunity to whine about the horrors of Mother’s Day too. A Los Angelino writing for Vogue last year during the height of the pandemic just wants her children who are cooped up with her at home to leave her alone on Mother’s Day.
The writer admits to being incredibly fortunate but just can’t shake her anxiety over the stress of e-learning, Zoom meetings, and the ‘groping arms of a 6-year-old.’
Nowhere does she state how she might alleviate her situation. I know the activist in me might want to petition the government to end draconian lockdowns long before I got around to carping about the commercialization of Mother’s Day.
Mom, Muz, Mother
But the daughter in me wants to talk about my mother or muz as I called her, in first person. I loved my mother. I am far from alone. Billions of people around the globe feel the same way although almost no one does so without a few caveats. I miss my mother. Again, this is not unusual. Millions of us are in the same boat. If we are fortunate, we will outlive our mothers, as I have. It has been almost two years since she passed and I know I will think of her every day. I do not know why it would be otherwise.
I am supremely guilty of commercializing Mother’s Day. I have in past years showered my mother with cards (yes more than one because one was never enough), flowers, her favorite dinner and often a small gift. But there was nothing – shameless promotion alert! — I wanted to give her more on Mother’s Day or for her birthday or for Christmas – heck, any day – than my published book. I greedily wanted another minute, hour, day, week, month, and ultimately even a year. And I will repeat: We all share this same feeling.
Alas, it was not to be. This too is a universal truth each of us must face. People die in their time (no, God’s time), not ours. She was on this Earth for 96 years. Who am I to ask for more?
One thing I know for sure is that it would have broken her heart to first see what the pandemic did to this country followed by how it was used to rig the election.
Another thing I know for sure is that if she were here today she would also really really like this card and well, possibly the book too!
Sources:
Mother’s Day 2021, History.com Editors (April 30, 2021). Link: https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/mothers-day#section_2
Anna Jarvis and the History of Mother’s Day, Retrokimmer.com (2014). Link: http://www.retrokimmer.com/2014/05/anna-jarvis-and-history-of-mothers-day.html
A Gallery of Mother’s Day Images
