Happy Mothers Day to everyone! For those clients and friends who are celebrating your very first Mother's Day, I hope you enjoy this day and all the many years of celebrating ahead. I will post a picture of me with my children and add it to this post later on. Right now I am still sipping my coffee, watching one of my kids eat breakfast, the other climbing on my husband, the third upstairs crying because his big sister isn't eating fast enough to go play with him and the last little one is kicking my laptop from inside the belly! So needless to say, now isn't a good picture taking time!
I thought it would also be fun to share the history of Mother's Day. I took this passage from
www.widpedia.com. I'd love to hear how everyone celebrates their day today, so if you have a moment drop a line on the blog here!
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.
For example, according to
IBISWorld, a publisher of business research, Americans will spend approximately $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts — like spa treatments — and another $68 million on greeting cards
[2]. Mother's Day will generate about 7.8% of the US jewelry industry's annual revenue in 2008. Americans are expected to spend close to $3.51 billion in 2008 on dining out for Mother's Day, with brunch and dinner being the most popular dining out options
[3].
