Mother's Day

For me it is difficult to imagine Mother's Day any different than it is today. I guess the originator of the holiday had a different idea in mind when she rallied for the special day.

According to Wikipedia, Mother's Day in the United States is an annual holiday celebrated on the second Sunday in May. Mother's Day recognizes mothers, motherhood and maternal bonds in general, as well as the positive contributions that they make to society.

Although many Mother's Day celebrations world-wide have quite different origins and traditions, most have now been influenced by the more recent American tradition established by Anna Jarvis, who campaigned for the holiday. Organized by Jarvis, the first official Mother's Day was celebrated at St. Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, which now holds the International Mother's Day Shrine.

Previous attempts at establishing Mother's Day in the United States sought to promote peace by means of honoring mothers who had lost or were at risk of losing their sons to war.

The commercialization of the American holiday began very early, and only nine years after the first official Mother's Day it had become so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become, spending all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.

She decried the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "...wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control ...She died later that year.

Whichever way you celebrate be Renewed!