Mother's Day....
Mother's Day is celebrated in many countries, including
the United Kingdom, the United States, Denmark, Finland, Italy,
Turkey, Australia, Mexico, Canada, China, Japan and Belgium. The
day is used by children and husbands to honor mothers and grandmothers
for all that they do in raising children.
Some historians claim that Mother's Day originates
from ancient spring festivals dedicated to maternal goddesses. Greeks
honored Rhea, wife of Cronus and mother of the gods and goddesses
of Greek mythology. Ancient Romans had a spring festival dedicated
to Cybele, also a mother goddess. Called Hilaria, this celebration
lasted for three days and included parades, games and masquerades.
Mothering Sunday
A more modern version of Mother's Day began in the
1600s in England. Mothering Sunday was celebrated on the fourth
Sunday of Lent. Small gifts were given, and a special dessert called
a simnel cake was served. In the United States, Mother's Day was
first suggested in 1872 by Julia Ward Howe (famous for writing the
words to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"). But it was a woman
who was never a mother herself who led the campaign for national
recognition of Mother's Day.
Anna Jarvis held a ceremony in 1907 in Grafton, West
Virginia, to honor her mother, who had died two years earlier. Jarvis'
mother had tried to establish Mother's Friendship Days as a way
of dealing with the aftermath of the Civil War. Anna Jarvis began
a campaign to create a national holiday honoring mothers. She and
her supporters wrote to ministers, businessmen and politicians,
and they were successful in their efforts.
In 1910, West Virginia became the first state to recognize
the new holiday, and the nation followed in 1914 when President
Wilson declared the second Sunday in May to be Mother's Day. Jarvis
used white carnations as a symbol for mothers, because carnations
represented sweetness, purity and the endurance of mother love.
(Today, white carnations represent a mother who has died, while
red carnations represent a living mother.)
Unfortunately, Jarvis became bitter over the commercialization
of the holiday. She filed a lawsuit to stop a 1923 Mother's Day
event and was even arrested for disturbing the peace at a mother's
convention where white carnations were being sold. Jarvis never
married and never had children. She died in 1948.
Mother's Day continues to be a very commercial holiday
in the United Kingdom. Flowers, sweets and cards are typical mother's day gifts,
and phone traffic is especially high on the fourth Sunday of Lent.
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