Editorial of May 9, 2024

Let’s Reboot Mother’s Day

Here comes Sunday, and this one is our annual big day for all the moms in our midst. Showing up at around the same time as the also-annual cherry blossoms, fish runs, Kentucky Derby and the onslaught of black flies, which unhappily leave us itching, scratching, and swollen all the way to Father’s Day, on the horizon on June 16. Although Mother’s Day began, before the Civil War, with a bunch of good intentions, today it’s a commercial event of staggering financial ramifications and, perhaps, questionable focus.

In 1858, in Taylor County, in what would become West Virginia, Ann Jarvis, a mother of 13, of which only four actually made it to adulthood, created Mother’s Day Work Clubs, whose members—women—addressed public health issues and provided assistance and education to families in the Appalachians in response to the high infant mortality rate caused by unsanitary conditions and childhood disease. During the Civil War, the clubs nursed the wounded and sick Union and Confederate soldiers, working tirelessly for peace, unity, reconciliation, community and, as well, a day to honor mothers.

Jarvis died in 1905. Three years later her daughter, Anna, took up the Mother’s Day mission, sending 500 white carnations to her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia, in her honor. Anna Jarvis then went on a campaign to make Mother’s Day officially recognized as a holiday, eventually achieving that goal when, on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a congressional resolution proclaiming the second Sunday in May Mother’s Day, a holiday that would be “a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” Wilson’s proclamation spelled ‘Mother’s’ in the singular, as Jarvis had insisted, to imply that each mother individually should be honored rather than all the mothers of the world together. The president also encouraged the people of the United States to fly the American flag out of respect for those many mothers.

The new holiday gained world-wide recognition in a hurry. Today, more than 40 countries celebrate annually their mothers, mothers-in-law, stepmothers and grandmothers, some under the guise of religion, others the culmination of heritage and history.

That was then. Through the years, the holiday gained the attention of commercial enterprises, and florists, restaurants, greeting-card manufacturers, greeting-card shops, jewelry stores and candy shops took advantage of the celebration. Mother’s Day has become one of the most commercially successful American occasions. It’s the most popular day of the year, in fact, not for giving Mom breakfast in bed, but for taking her out to a restaurant; it generates a significant portion of the U.S. jewelry industry’s annual revenue. Indeed, on this long-established holiday initially intended as a means to bestow love and honor upon all of our mothers, we Americans now spend around $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts (spa treatments and the like) and another $68 million on greeting cards (an estimated 50 percent of households send 113 million Mother’s Day cards)—it’s truly a Hallmark Holiday.

But Mother’s Day was born of a caring group’s efforts for peace, unity, reconciliation, community and kindness. A great idea. We could try that. Happy Mother’s Day.