Mums across the world didn’t get together one day to come up with Mother’s Day as an easy way to get pancakes in bed. And despite how it seems, florists and card companies didn’t invent it as a way to make a few (billion) bucks.
The origin of Mother’s Day began back in the early 1900s.
A woman named Anna Jarvis started a campaign for an official holiday
honouring mothers in 1905, the year her own mother died.
The first larger-scale celebration of the holiday was in 1908, when Anna held a public memorial for her mother in her hometown of Grafton in West Virginia.
Over the next few years, she pushed to have the holiday officially recognised and it was celebrated increasingly in more and more states around the U.S.
Finally, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation making
Mother’s Day an official holiday, to take place the second Sunday of May and it quickly gained worldwide acceptance and celebration.
Anna Jarvis put Mother’s Day on the calendar as a day dedicated to expressing love and gratitude to mothers, acknowledging the sacrifices women make for their children. That’s why she was determined to keep “Mother’s” a singular possessive, as marked by the apostrophe before “s”.
Each family should celebrate its own mother, so that individual women across the country could feel the love, even in the midst of a broad celebration of motherhood.
