Happy (American) Mother's Day!

Mother's Day (Father's Day too but that is for another entry) has always intrigued me because so many countries celebrate it on different days all through the year. If it was based on a religious holiday (be it originally pagan or christian) you would think it would land within a few weeks or a certain time of the year. But Norway has their Mother's Day holiday in February and it continues on different dates throughout the year, with Indonesia celebrating it in December. So although I'm sure every country has their own reasons for celebrating it on a certain day, I'm only really interested in the U.S. and U.K. (obviously, ha!)

The early Christians celebrated the Mother's festival on the fourth Sunday of Lent to honor Mary, the mother of Christ. It later incorporated all Mothers and was called Mothering Sunday. The English still celebrate it on the fourth Sunday of Lent, which is in March. I kind of find this amusing as the English tend to be more withdrawn from "Religion" but have still kept this Lenten tradition. But tradition is tradition so maybe it's not as surprising.

The English colonists who settled in America discontinued the tradition of Mothering Sunday. Apparently due to harsh conditions and conflicting views with their Puritan beliefs. In the U.S. it wasn't until 1872 that movements began to organize a day for mothers dedicated to peace (mainly pushed by all the death surrounding the Civil War). Then in 1907, Anna M. Jarvis, a Philadelphia schoolteacher, began a movement to set up a national Mother's Day in honor of her mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis. The first Mother's Day observance was a church service honoring Anna's mother. Anna's hard work finally paid off in 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the second Sunday in May as a national holiday in honor of mothers (partly due to the rise of the suffragist movement). So there you go...

Happy Mother's Day Theresa and Karen!!!

XoXoXo Jamie & Ang