Derek Nastasi
Sunday May 12th is Mother’s Day, the American holiday when we honor the mothers and female caregivers of this country and how they have done their part in building up our youth and ultimately this great nation.
Celebrations honoring mothers are said to have begun in Ancient Greece and Rome where the Greeks honored Rhea, who was the mother of the Gods and Goddesses, with festivals and gatherings in the Spring and in Rome they celebrated Cybele the mother God; these traditions originated no later than 250 BC. A very similar holiday in Great Britain and Ireland called Mothering Sunday, which has Christian origins and was created in the 16th century, may have had some strong influence on Mother’s Day, noting that the celebration is the same and they are both on Sundays. In America the term Republican Motherhood is used to describe the social attitudes towards the roles of being a mother describing the mother's role as to teach her child right from wrong and to make them a good citizen which is said to date back to the years slightly before the American Revolutionary War but was made popular after the war.
The history of Mother’s Day as a national holiday began in West Virginia in the 1850’s when a women’s group organizer Ann Reeves organized “Mother’s Day work clubs” to try and fix problems of unsanitariness, infant mortality rates, fight disease, and stop milk contamination. This group also were medics in the Civil War years who took care of wounded soldiers from both sides and later down the road influenced Mother’s to be seen as a sign of spreading peace.
Then, in 1908 a woman named Anna Jarvis held a memorial to honor her mother at the St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia. The memorials had begun to gain momentum in this country until, finally in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday in America to take place on the second Sunday of May. The holiday’s main purpose initially was a response to World War I to give mothers a day to mourn their lost sons who have died in combat. Anna Jarvis actually hated the holiday after it was taken over by commercialism and spent the last part of her life fighting to try and get it removed.
Now you know the history of Mother’s Day but it's our job to carry on this great tradition by honoring the mother figure in our lives and thank them for guiding us in the right direction and giving us their care.