Mother’s Day

The earliest historical celebrations of motherhood can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. Every spring, they held a festival honoring Rhea, the mythological mother of the gods, which included massive feasts, offerings of honey cakes, and floral decorations to celebrate fertility and the renewal of life.

The ancient Romans adapted this tradition into a massive festival dedicated to Cybele. Known as the Hilaria, this multi-day spring celebration involved games, masquerades, and elaborate parades honoring the Great Mother of the Gods, demonstrating that the sociological urge to celebrate maternal figures is deeply wired into human history.

The United Kingdom celebrates a completely distinct holiday with entirely different historical roots. Mothering Sunday originally began in the Middle Ages as a religious requirement during Lent for people to return to their mother church, the main church or cathedral of the area, which eventually evolved into a day for domestic servants to be given time off to visit their families.

The American version of the holiday was born out of the horrific sanitation crisis of the Civil War. Before the holiday officially existed, a social activist named Ann Reeves Jarvis organized local work clubs to combat high infant mortality rates by teaching Appalachian mothers basic hygiene, and these remarkable clubs famously treated wounded soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy.

The modern holiday was founded to honor one specific mother’s prayer. Following the death of Ann Reeves Jarvis, her daughter Anna Jarvis relentlessly campaigned to create a memorial day to fulfill her mother’s lifelong wish of seeing a holiday that specifically recognized the matchless, selfless service that mothers render to humanity.

The holiday was officially cemented into American law just before the First World War. Thanks to Anna Jarvis bombarding politicians with letters, President Woodrow Wilson signed a presidential proclamation in 1914 officially designating the second Sunday in May as a national holiday dedicated to expressing love and reverence for the mothers of the country.

The white carnation was chosen for a very specific symbolic reason. Because it was her mother’s favorite flower, Anna Jarvis selected the white carnation as the official emblem of the holiday, explaining that its white color symbolized truth and purity, its lasting fragrance represented a mother’s memory, and its broad shape represented maternal love.

The floral industry completely manipulated the original symbolism to double their profits. When white carnations kept selling out, opportunistic florists invented a new tradition, heavily promoting the idea that people should wear red carnations to honor living mothers and reserve white carnations strictly for those who had passed away.

The founder possessed a violent, visceral hatred for printed greeting cards. As the commercialization of her holiday skyrocketed, Anna Jarvis publicly attacked the greeting card industry, famously stating that buying a printed card was nothing but a poor excuse for a child who was simply too lazy to write a heartfelt, handwritten letter to the woman who raised them.

The modern economic scale of the holiday is absolutely staggering. Despite the founder’s wishes, consumer spending on the holiday continues to break historical records, with the National Retail Federation projecting that Americans will spend over thirty-four billion dollars in 2025 alone on flowers, jewelry, greeting cards, and special outings.

Anna Jarvis spent her entire life savings fighting to completely abolish her own creation. Horrified that her holy day of sentiment had transformed into a massive corporate profit machine, Jarvis spent decades filing massive lawsuits against copyright infringers, trade vandals, and corporate profiteers in a desperate attempt to legally rescind the holiday.

She was literally arrested for violently protesting against florists and confectioners. In 1923, Jarvis completely crashed a retail confectioner convention to protest their economic gouging, and on another occasion, her relentless, disruptive protesting against the floral industry for raising the price of carnations led to her being arrested for disturbing the peace.

She even engaged in a bitter public feud with the First Lady of the United States. When Eleanor Roosevelt attempted to use the massive popularity of the holiday to raise money for charities supporting the health and welfare of women and children, Jarvis angrily rebuked her, insisting that the day was strictly for sentiment, not for raising public funds.

The actual date of the celebration fluctuates wildly across the globe. While the United States observes it on the second Sunday in May, much of the Arab world celebrates it on the Spring Equinox, while numerous Eastern European nations tied their celebration of mothers directly to International Women’s Day in early March.

The founder died broke and alone in a sanitarium paid for by her greatest enemies. In a deeply tragic and ironic twist of historical fate, a broke, legally blind, and completely exhausted Anna Jarvis was admitted to a Pennsylvania sanitarium in her final years, where her massive medical bills were reportedly paid secretly by the very floral and greeting card executives she had spent her life fighting.