Mother's Day

Mother’s day is this coming Sunday. Last year I ignored the holiday, for obvious reasons. This year I’m going to a party out on Long Island, but I still don't really feel too festive. Maybe I should just embrace the day as a celebration of my own role as Jack’s mother/father but frankly, that’s a little too weird so I’ll just motor through it like last year. I have no idea how I’m going to approach this holiday when Jack gets a little older, but that is a worry for another time.

The history of Mother’s Day is actually quite interesting. I originally thought that Mother’s Day had been invented by Hallmark to sell cards and candy-and that is indeed what it turned into-but a little internet research revealed that the holiday has a lengthier and more storied history. One school of thought claims that the 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 around the Ides of March.
In the United States, Mother's Day imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. It was originally intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, Howe wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. She ultimately failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. She was directly influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides. In 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.
When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the drive for a memorial day for women. The first Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. (This building now houses the International Mother's Day Shrine).The custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared 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.
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. Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. –Thanks to Wikipedia for most of the history cited above.