For those who think Mother's Day is just a bullshit commercial holiday, well it is now, but that's not at all where it came from. It was originally a holiday started by an anti-war activist to honor mother's who lost their sons to war!
From the
Wikipedia entry:
The United States celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the
United States, Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist
Julia Ward Howe after the
American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the
Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by
Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.
When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named
Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in
Grafton, West Virginia, on
10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Originally the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a
National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912. In 1914 President
Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.
Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the
National Restaurant Association, Mother's Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.
So I reccomend doing something for your mom, or the mom in your life that honors the original intention of the holiday as well as the individual mother. Even just talking about what it really is supposed to mean is a major step in the right direction.