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Mother's Day History
People have celebrated mothers and motherhood since ancient times. The Mother's Day celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient Greece, honoring Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Early Christians started celebrating the festival of Mother’s Day on the fourth Sunday of Lent in honor of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of Christ. In England during the 1600's they stretched the holiday to include all mothers, and named it “Mothering Sunday” in honor of all the mothers of England.
In the United States, the following events in Mother's Day history contributed to Mother's Day being celebrated on the second Sunday in May.
- In 1858, Anna Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker, organized "Mother's Work Days" to improve the sanitation and avert deaths from disease-bearing insects and seepage of polluted water.
- In 1872, Julia Ward Howe, a Boston poet, pacifist and women's suffragist(who wrote the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic) established a special Mother's Work Day. A day dedicated to peace. Ms.Howe held organized Mother's Day meetings in Boston every year.
- In 1905, after Anna Jarvis died, her daughter, a Philadelphia schoolteacher, also named Anna, decided to memorialize her mother's lifelong activism, and began a campaign to have a memorial day for women.
The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on May 10, 1908, in the church where the elder Anna Jarvis had taught Sunday School. At one of the first services organized to celebrate Anna's mother, Anna handed out her mother's favorite flower, the white carnation.
- Grafton is home to the International Mother's Day Shrine. From there, the custom caught on, spreading to 45 states and Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Mexico and Canada. The Governor of West Virginia proclaimed Mother's Day in 1912. Finally in 1914, President, Woodrow Wilson, declared the first national Mother's Day.
Mother's Day has flourished in the United States. In fact, the second Sunday of May is the most popular day of the year to dine out, and telephone lines record their highest traffic as sons and daughters everywhere take time out to call home and wish Mom a happy Mother's Day!
Today, etiquette books include guidelines for wearing carnations on Mother's Day: red or pink carnations are worn to recognize living mothers and white carnations represent mothers who have died. Of course, greeting cards and gifts are now a far more common way to mark the holiday, and Jewelryformother.com has several Great Mother's Day Gifts that are sure to please every mother and grandmother on your shopping list.
