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Mother’s Day in America

In the United States, even before there was an official Mother’s Day, there were efforts to set aside certain days to honor mothers. According to World Book Advanced, in 1872, Julia Ward Howe suggested June 2nd be a day of peace, honoring mothers in the United States. She held an annual Mother’s Day meeting in Boston for several years to celebrate the day.

There were others to follow, such as Kentucky schoolteacher Mary Towles Sasseen, who started conducting Mother’s Day in 1887, and Frank E. Hering of South Bend, Ind., who created a campaign to observe Mother’s Day in 1904.

The official Mother’s Day, as recognized by an act of Congress, was the brainchild of Anna Jarvis, a school teacher who lived in Grafton, W.Va., with her mother also named Anna. Jarvis was devastated by her mother’s death in 1905 on May 10.

“In one of those mad boundless leaps taken only by the most creative holiday entrepreneurs, Anna Jarvis went national,” wrote American Enterprise magazine, the publication of the American Enterprise Institute. “She decided that henceforth, on the anniversary of her mother’s death, all Americans ought to honor the women who gave them birth.”

Mother’s Day Voted Down!

A freshman senator from Nebraska put Miss Jarvis’s proposal to the Senate and it met with wide-ranging opposition. One senator moved to amend the entire law with just one sentence from the 10 Commandments: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” Other senators, however, were outraged at the idea of needing a day established to celebrate their feelings for their mothers.

The Senate by an overwhelming margin of 33-14 killed the measure by sending it back to committee. However, as American Enterprise magazine related, Anna Jarvis was not deterred. She called on the World’s Sunday School Association. By 1914, the idea of a Mother’s Day became the darling cause of members of Congress, and the holiday, set for the second Sunday of May, became part of our national culture.

For the first Mother’s Day in 1908, Jarvis called on people to observe by wearing a single white carnation on their lapel. Author Leigh Eric Schmidt wrote in The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870-1930 that this call by Jarvis provided “the opening wedge” for the floral industry.

Capitalism Enters the History of Mother’s Day

Schmidt quoted the strategy of the floral industry as printed in the trade magazine American Florist in 1919, “All the other holidays of the year have features that are taken advantage of by various lines of business, but the second Sunday in May is purely a floral holiday, which can and should be made of great advantage to the entire trade.” Within a few years, other businesses were cashing in on the holiday.

“As it became clear that the florists were molding her ‘holy day’ to their own ends, (Jarvis) became increasingly angered and alienated,” wrote Schmidt.

Jarvis became a harsh critic of the way Mother’s Day was being celebrated. She called greeting cards “a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write.” She urged people to wear celluloid buttons and not to buy flowers for their mothers.

Jarvis’s idealism, however, was no match for people’s understandable urge to spend money on Mom, or for the industry that catered to that urge. As quoted by American Enterprise, Jarvis “concluded that ‘charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites’ had corrupted ‘with their greed one of the finest, noblest, truest Movements and celebrations known.”
On Mother’s Day, We Spend and We Love
The Mother’s Day that we now celebrate is still a time to spend money. A survey by the National Retail Federation finds that consumers will spend an average of $138.63 for Mother’s Day in 2008.

“Total consumer spending is expected to reach $15.8 billion,” said the federation in a press release.

However, it would be a bit harsh to say that just because we spend $138.63 on flowers, cards and other gifts, we corrupt the spirit of Mother’s Day. Most of us probably buy cards because they are beautiful, not because we are too lazy to write. Many children make their own cards to give to Mom. Yes, they do spend money on the materials to make the cards, but that small loving gesture shows that despite the commercialization in the history of Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May still remains the “finest, noblest, truest Movements and celebrations known.”

Related Articles:
2006 Presidential Mother’s Day Proclamation
Mothers Day eGreeting Cards
When is Mother’s Day Around the World?
2004 Presidential Mother’s Day Proclamation
Mother’s Day Gift Guide
Mother’s Day Origins Trace To Ancient Times
By Hao-Nhien Vu

The History of Valentine’s Day

Every February, across the country, candy, flowers, and gifts are exchanged between loved ones, all in the name of St. Valentine. But who is this mysterious saint and why do we celebrate this holiday? The history of Valentine’s Day — and its patron saint — is shrouded in mystery. But we do know that February has long been a month of romance. St. Valentine’s Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition. So, who was Saint Valentine and how did he become associated with this ancient rite? Today, the Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or Valentinus, all of whom were martyred.

One legend contends that Valentine was a priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and families, he outlawed marriage for young men — his crop of potential soldiers. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret. When Valentine’s actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death.

Other stories suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians escape harsh Roman prisons where they were often beaten and tortured.

According to one legend, Valentine actually sent the first ‘valentine’ greeting himself. While in prison, it is believed that Valentine fell in love with a young girl — who may have been his jailor’s daughter — who visited him during his confinement. Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter, which he signed ‘From your Valentine,’ an expression that is still in use today. Although the truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories certainly emphasize his appeal as a sympathetic, heroic, and, most importantly, romantic figure. It’s no surprise that by the Middle Ages, Valentine was one of the most popular saints in England and France.

While some believe that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine’s death or burial — which probably occurred around 270 A.D — others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine’s feast day in the middle of February in an effort to ‘christianize’ celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors.

Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat’s hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine’s Day around 498 A.D. The Roman ‘lottery’ system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed. Later, during the Middle Ages, it was commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of birds’ mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of February — Valentine’s Day — should be a day for romance. The oldest known valentine still in existence today was a poem written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London following his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The greeting, which was written in 1415, is part of the manuscript collection of the British Library in London, England.

Several years later, it is believed that King Henry V hired a writer named John Lydgate to compose a valentine note to Catherine of Valois.

In Great Britain, Valentine’s Day began to be popularly celebrated around the seventeenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was common for friends and lovers in all social classes to exchange small tokens of affection or handwritten notes. By the end of the century, printed cards began to replace written letters due to improvements in printing technology. Ready-made cards were an easy way for people to express their emotions in a time when direct expression of one’s feelings was discouraged.
Cheaper postage rates also contributed to an increase in the popularity of sending Valentine’s Day greetings. Americans probably began exchanging hand-made valentines in the early 1700s. In the 1840s, Esther A. Howland began to sell the first mass-produced valentines in America.

According to the Greeting Card Association, an estimated one billion valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine’s Day the second largest card-sending holiday of the year. (An estimated 2.6 billion cards are sent for Christmas.)

Approximately 85 percent of all valentines are purchased by women. In addition to the United States, Valentine’s Day is celebrated in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Valentine greetings were popular as far back as the Middle Ages (written Valentine’s didn’t begin to appear until after 1400), and the oldest known Valentine card is on display at the British Museum. The first commercial Valentine’s Day greeting cards produced in the U.S. were created in the 1840s by Esther A. Howland. Howland, known as the Mother of the Valentine, made elaborate creations with real lace, ribbons and colorful pictures known as “scrap”.

Special thanks to American Greetings.