The History of Mothers Day

Surprisingly enough, Mother’s Day actually has quite the history.  Hopefully, it’s not the only time you buy your Mum flowers but it does serve as the gentlest of reminders to pay much-deserved tribute to your dear old Ma. Read on for a brief summary of the Celebration of Mother’s Day through the Ages.

It all starts with the Ancient Greeks, well, the Romans too but we’ll start off with these guys. The Greeks celebrated many things and fortunately, one of them was Rhea, who was the mother to most Greek deities.

The ancient Romans, in a similar fashion, used to celebrate Cybele, in a spring festival called Hilaria. If you know anything about ancient civilisations, you probably already know that they love to pay tribute to anything to do with fertility, Cybele is no exception. It is understood that this practice started 250 years prior to the birth of Christ, which is really something.

Speaking of Christ, early Christians of celebrated something called ‘Mothering Sunday’ in which servants, general house attendants and children were encouraged to take time out from their daily activities to focus on paying homage to their Mothers instead. Not only this, on Mothering Sunday they took time out to honour the Virgin Mary. Mothering Sunday was practised every Fourth Sunday of Lent.

Now, we move into more modern times starting with a woman named Julia Ward Howe, who was all about peace. She wanted Mother's Day to be celebrated on June, annually. She obviously didn’t make much headway as Anna Jarvis, hailed as the ‘Founder of Mother's Day” moved the date to the second Sunday of each May in XXXX. She was an activist and social worker who really loved her own mother and just wanted other mothers to be honoured, too. Surprisingly enough, Jarvis never married and thus, was never a mother herself. Sadly, later on in her life, Jarvis hated how commercial the holiday had become and spent much of her time trying to get the holiday removed from calendars. Poor thing.

So, that’s a very brief overview of Mother’s Day for you. It may seem like one of the lesser holidays in contrast to Christmas or Easter but we think the founding foremothers of the holiday would love for you to take the time to let your Ma know you appreciate her. Yes, you can embrace the commerciality of the holiday, Jarvis might not like that but hey, buying things for your mum is still a pretty nice way of celebrating her.

Why not try making your mum a meal, or something sweet? Take her out and about. She’ll love it!