Anna Jarvis fought against commercializing Mother’s Day
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
In this world of instant commercialism, one would have to be under a rock not to know that Sunday is Mother’s Day. It is considered a national holiday, but not even mothers get Monday off as with other national holidays.
I might even be so bold as to say, especially mothers. How would the world run without them on a holiday?
England celebrated its Mother’s Day back on March 26, although over there it is called "Mothering Sunday" and has been celebrated as such since the 1600s on every 4th Sunday of Lent, those 40 days leading up to Easter.
Historically, "Mothering Sunday," is traced to England’s caste system in which many of the poor worked as servants for the wealthy. Most of the servants were in the "Upstairs Downstairs" syndrome famous in England where the servants lived in the homes of their employers.
"Mothering Sunday" was a time when the servants were given a day off to go home and spend the day with their mothers.
It was a time when a special, very rich fruit cake, called the mothering cake, was baked to add to the celebration. The Lenten fast dictated that the cake had to keep until Easter. It was boiled in water, then baked, and was often finished with an almond icing. Sometimes the crust was made of flour and water, colored with saffron.
In northern England and in Scotland, the celebration included carlings — pancakes made of peas fried in butter. Carlings, or peas, were soaked overnight, then fried in butter. In folklore, it was said the person getting the last pea in the dish would be the first to marry.
America’s celebration got a slow start, considering our cousins across the Atlantic. In 1907, Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia began a campaign for a national recognition of all mothers. She first persuaded her mother’s church in Grafton, West Virginia to celebrate Mother’s Day on the second anniversary of her mother’s death, the second Sunday of May.
Mother’s Day was founded in Grafton on May 10, 1908. Today there is an International Mother’s Day Shrine in that West Virginia city.
Jarvis campaigned relentlessly to make Mother’s Day a national celebration. By 1911, Mother’s Day was celebrated in almost every state on the second Sunday in May, but not until 1914 did President Woodrow Wilson make it a national holiday.
As a boy, I remember wearing a red carnation in my coat button hole when I went to Sunday School on Mother’s day. That meant my mother was alive. White was for a deceased mother. Carnations were chosen because carnations, were Jarvis’ mother’s favorite flower. That symbolic flower caused Jarvis trouble, however. When the U.S. Postal Service announced it was issuing a Mother’s Day stamp with the image of Whistler’s Mother and a vase of white carnations, Jarvis persuaded President Roosevelt to remove the words, Mother’s Day, but not the white carnations. She disrupted a meeting of the American War Mothers in the 1930s, protesting their sale of white carnations for Mother’s Day, and was removed by the police. She thought selling flowers commercialized the celebration.
She didn’t win that battle. Mother’s Day remains in the United States one of the best sale days for florists. And, as a final ironic twist, Jarvis was confined to a nursing home at the end of her life, penniless. Her nursing home bills were paid, unbeknownst to her, by the Florist’s Exchange.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or via e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)