After watching all day, Mork told Orson that today was Woman in Relation to Her Children’s Day. It’s an occasion where overfed Americans stand in line for hours to pay too much much money for a mediocre meal that took far too long to be served by frazzled employees who can’t get out of working long, noisy shifts on Mother’s Day (big chaos, small tips). Mork added that this activity was preceded by handsful of fast-dying flowers, stiff paper cards that say mostly fuzzy and flowery things written by lonely people in small rooms, and itchy World’s Best Mom t-shirts. Herd-like creatures, these Americans.
Was It a Woman Who Created Mother’s Day? Or Was It a Man?
If you’re like most of us, you’ve lately been noticing Mother’s Day grafted onto calendars on all your digital devices and a paper version stuck on the front of your refrigerator. Until last week, I’d never thought about it being a National holiday, or where it came from or how it got to here, today. So I started by putting together a good definition of our key terms, essential to any worthwhile investigation. A dozen sites agree our word holiday means a period of time set aside for public festivals or recreation. If that’s so, Mother’s Day (or is it Mothers’ Day?) is not a holiday.
Whether or not we’re aware of it on a conscious level is a matter for another time
Mother’s Day means dedicated to celebrating one female parent. That would be your mother, biological or otherwise. Move the apostrophe and you get Mothers’ Day, meaning celebrating all mothers equally around the world. From what I was able to find last week, it began one way and ended another.
Nearly every source I checked said the origin of Mothers’ Day in the United States involves Anna Jarvis, a Tennessee schoolteacher, and her mother Ann Reeves Jarvis, a West Virginian social activist and Sunday School teacher. Anna’s mother Ann organized Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to teach local women how to properly care for their children. At the end of the Civil War, she founded Mothers’ Friendship Day to unite Union and Confederate mothers and soldiers and restore harmony among former enemies.
Olive Ricketts, executive director of the Anna Jarvis Birthplace Museum in Webster, West Virginia, says “Ann wore gray even though she was blue.” They played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ first for the North and then ‘Dixie’ for the South. Then they played ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ By the time the band got to the words ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot,’ all 5,000 men had laid down their weapons and made up with their neighbors. Ann said, ‘There’s no reason for us to fight a war that’s over.’”
The BBC says “In the work clubs mothers learned about hygiene and sanitation, such as the vital importance of boiling drinking water. The organisers (BBC-correct) provided medicine and supplies to sick families and, when necessary, quarantined entire households to prevent epidemics.”
Several years after Ann Reeves Jarvis’s death, her nearly-namesake Ann/Anna spinster* (period-correct) daughter Anna Maria Jarvis wrote letters to newspapers, churches and politicians lobbying for the declaration of an official Mother’s Day. According to the Associated Press, Anna Maria wrote so many letters that she bought a neighboring house to store her correspondence. She continued to press for formal recognition of mothers until President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday in 1914.
And then the younger Jarvis changed sides
The woman who invented Mother’s (most assuredly not Mothers’) Day started out as an activist and ended up a relentless scold. She tried to have the holiday canceled because it had become a commercial event and not the tribute she or her mother had first intended.
Jarvis actively campaigned against what she called commercial and political exploitation and profiteering
She boycotted florists for price-gouging and protested a candy-makers convention. She, the dutiful daughter, thought it should be a day of private reverence and acknowledgment for all that mothers do for their families. And everyone should agree with her.
Connecticut Insider says “When Jarvis learned the lunch she ordered in a Philadelphia tearoom was named the “Mother’s Day Salad,” she dumped it on the floor.”
Jarvis didn’t get her way
Wikipedia says friends and associates packed her off to an institution for the confinement of insane persons. Others contend that the flower and card sellers paid handsomely to keep her there, not out of respect, but as a way of keeping her quiet, her nonsense talk about getting rid of the highly-profitable commercialization of this National holiday.
Anna died of dementia at the age of 84, blind, penniless, childless, and alone on a ward in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium. Anna was buried next to her mother Ann. A real tearjerker movie ending.
The daughter’s idea of Mother’s Day
“It wasn’t for us to buy our mother a gift or take her out to dinner. All we wanted was, for one day a year, a mother should be able to sit on the back porch with a cup of coffee and not be disturbed.” Today the gang over at Cracker Barrel is going gaga predicting when the porch tie-in promotion blows up the prediction markets. It’ll have not only the old guy in overalls, but his farm wife, too. Julie, I recommend you cast Ray and Wilma Yoder.
Those who say they knew Jarvis the daughter agree with her beliefs that no gift was more personal than something written from the heart. To her, profiteers were “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites.” She condemned printed Mothers’ Day cards as “meaning nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”
Psychology Today says Mother’s Day is nonsense
Meredith Atwood calls herself the Doctor of Nonsense. She says ”Mother’s Day is an unfair holiday to push upon people who have lost their mothers, lost a child, hate their mothers, hate their children, want to be a mother (but can’t), don’t want to be a mother (and are societally shamed for it), thought they wanted to be a mother and realize ‘Whoops, that was a mistake,’ are dealing with infertility, adoption, or fear, have mothered their grandchildren or other family members (and resent this), and other complex gender issues around mothering.”
Enough with the Jarvises
Some say Francis Earle Hering is “the grandfather of Notre Dame football, the first player known to have thrown the overhand spiral pass, the guardian of the dispossessed, and the father of Mother’s Day.”
Scholastic says Hering’s inspiration for a national Mother’s Day came when he observed Notre Dame students (all males until 1983) writing home to their mothers. It seems far beyond quaint now to read how in the early 1900s, “Practically every boy has as his sweetheart his mother – and that the surest way to appeal to him for his best efforts in building his character and his grades … was to remind him of the deep happiness his mother receives.”
In an interview with Scholastic, Hering said “Throughout history, the great men (period-correct) of the world have given credit for their achievements to their mothers. The Holy Church recognizes this, as does Notre Dame especially, and Our Lady who watches over our great institution.”
Connection Newspapers said “In the late 1800s, Frank Hering was the University of Notre Dame’s star quarterback, coach and captain of the football team before becoming a history professor and the school’s first athletic director. But even if his name is not familiar, mothers everywhere will be celebrated this weekend with the holiday he championed more than 100 years ago.”
The Notre Dame Archives says the first head coach at the University of Notre Dame proposed the idea of “setting aside of one day in the year as a nationwide memorial to the memory of Mothers and motherhood.” Herring’s idea for a national Mothers’ Day came in 1904, a year before Jarvis’ mother died and four years before Jarvis led the first formal observations of Mothers’ Day in churches in 1908.
In 1925, “The Society of War Mothers” invited Hering to participate in a special Mother’s Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. There, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, before a large audience that included many congressmen and senators, Hering was introduced as “the Father of Mother’s Day.”
Weekly View says “We have been thoroughly convinced by documented evidence that the inspiration for the present Mother’s Day came from a man – Frank E. Hering of South Bend, Indiana.”
The article went on to trace the holiday’s origins to Hering’s first public talks on the subject in 1904 and 1905, and found that “Mr. Hering’s activities and addresses in favor of Mother’s Day came three years before Anna Jarvis’s first observance of Mother’s Day in May 1908.”
Jarvis resented Hering’s claim
Mel Magazine tells us of an undated statement from the 1920s titled “Kidnapping Mother’s Day: Will You Be an Accomplice?” Jarvis is quoted as having said “Do me the justice of refraining from furthering the selfish interests of this claimant who is making a desperate effort to snatch from me the rightful title of originator and founder of Mother’s Day, established by me after decades of untold labor, time and expense.”
According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a Kentucky teacher named Mary Towles Sasseen promoted the idea of schools honoring mothers in 1887.
Nothing shy about our Mary
She promoted her idea that Mother’s Day be observed on the same date as her own mother’s birthday. Enough Kentucky public schools adopted her proposal that in 1926, the Kentucky legislature declared her the “originator of the idea of the Celebration of Mother’s Day.”
And now, this public service message
Do not take your mother out to brunch, lunch, tea, or dinner on Mothers’ Day this year. If you want to take your mother to a place that serves food and drink, choose any day BUT the second Sunday in May. Most restaurants agree that Mother’s Day is the worst day of the year.
Today is Monday, May 4th
In just a few days, restaurants will be packed on Sunday at lunch, brunch, and dinner. Don’t let the advertising and PR machines suck you in this year. As a dining-out holiday, Mothers’ Day is second only to Valentine’s Day. But they dine out two at a time on Valentine’s Day. On Mother’s Day, people bring their entire families with them, making it one of the busiest days of the year for restaurants meaning one of the worst for diners.
The Daily Meal says a major issue is the unrealistic expectations customers have for great food and great service
People like to linger over holiday meals, so a one-hour wait is typical and two-hour wait times are not uncommon. As if that’s not enough, you can count on rushed or downright bad service and jacked-up prices. US News says Americans are expected to spend more than $34 billion on Mother’s Day this year, with average spending reaching $259 per person,” which is serious lingering money.
This year, watch for faked emotional, tear-jerking, tug-at-your heartstrings Mothers’ Day-themed advertising promotions from such mother-oriented products as Samsung, KFC, Coca-Cola, IKEA, Proctor & Gamble, Walmart, and get this, Paris Hilton opening up about her struggles. And don’t forget Hallmark, the choice for the times when you don’t care enough to write your own thank you note.
One 2022 survey of 1,024 moms with children still living at home found that what moms want most for Mother’s Day is a nap
Mattress maker Allswell jumped on those data. Allwell’s #BantheBrunch social media campaign advised mothers to skip the too-often-stressful brunch and stay in bed all day.
Which is not a bad idea. You might even want to take Taj Mahal’s advice in the 3:05 video Cakewalk Into Town: “I woke up this mornin’ feelin’ so good, you know, I lay back down again.”
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* There was once a spinster librarian at a college I attended. Painfully shy, painfully nearsighted, sensible laced shoes, and a bun the size of a ball of grey knitting wool with pencils buried inside, erasers out, safety first. When momentarily puzzled, she’d lightly tap her scalp with one of the pencils she always kept pointy with the hand-cranked pencil grinder on the wall next to the large wooden card catalog. She had more knowledge than you’d find in a good set of encyclopedias, she loved to play the ponies, and she always had tiny yellow and black and tan shavings stuck in her sweater from emptying the pencil sharpener twice a day. In giving instructions for her funeral, she required that all the pallbearers be women. “Men didn’t take me out while I was alive and they certainly won’t when I’m dead”, she was quoted to have said.
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My name is David Allan Van Nostrand. That’s my mother and me next to an old gray Pontiac in Schenectady, NY. I’ve another picture of that car on the Atlantic Ocean beach sand at Daytona Beach, Florida. I wrote this story and more than 500 others posted on this site alone, so you’re bound to find some things you like and some things you don’t. Some are on the serious side, some show a glimmer of wit, and a few are eye-opening, but all are presentations of facts I was able to find during a couple of days of poking around.
I’ve investigated thousands of things big and small. What can I take a closer look at for you?
