History of Mother’s Day

Today morning when I saw Times of India, I got surprised to see around 7 pages dedicated to only Mother’s day. That is how I came to know that today is mother’s day. So today I will tell you the history of Mother’s day. The modern Mother’s Day holiday was created by Anna Jarvis as a day for each family to honor its mother. Anna Jarvis was the daughter of Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. On 12th May, 1907, two years after her mother’s death, she held a memorial to her mother and also started a campaign to make “Mother’s Day” a recognized holiday. She succeeded in making this nationally recognized in 1914. And finally the International Mother’s Day Shrine was established in Grafton to commemorate her accomplishment.

Within a few years this holiday got commercialized in USA. But Anna was unhappy with the commercialization of the holiday and she started opposing this holiday but she was unable to stop the commercialization of the holiday. Moreover she started a campaign against the commercialization of this day. However some historians claim this day emerged from a custom of mother worship in ancient Greece, which kept a festival to Cybele, a great mother of Greek gods. Last year on mother’s day Americans spend approximately $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts-like spa treatments-and another $68 million on greeting cards. Mother’s Day generated about 7.8% of the U.S. jewelry industry’s annual revenue in 2008.

Let’s end this article with the lines of George Cooper

Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,
Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,
Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,
But only one mother the wide world over.

Happy Mother’s day.