Do you ever wonder why we have Mother’s Day? Well, Mother’s Day is a day when moms are celebrated for their hard work and dedication to their families. This holiday occurs every year on the second Sunday in May in the United States. This particular day of appreciation gives kids the opportunity to show their love to their mothers.  

Before this holiday became official on the American calendar, other cultures in history had a similar way of celebrating mothers. According to http://www.history.com, “Celebrations of mothers and motherhood can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who held festivals in honor of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele, but the clearest modern precedent for Mother’s Day is the early Christian festival known as ‘Mothering Sunday.’ This used to be a huge tradition in the United Kingdom and Europe, when Christians would return to their mother church for a special service. The celebration became more of a secular holiday as the years passed where children would give flowers and gifts to moms.

History.com explains that the official celebration of Mother’s Day in America was started by a girl named Anna Jarvis, to honor her mother’s death. She imagined Mother’s Day as a day to honor and appreciate every single hard-working mom. After receiving money from a bank in Philadelphia, she planned the first official celebration for moms at the Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia.

After her successful first Mother’s day she noticed her holiday wasn’t on the national calendar. She argued that American holidays were biased toward male achievements, and wrote a letter to politicians and newspapers talking about Mother’s Day being a national holiday. In 1912, many states had Mother’s Day as a annual holiday and Jarvis had established a Mother’s Day International Association to help her cause. Her hard work really paid off. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a document establishing that every second Sunday in May would be Mother’s Day.

Although Jarvis was proud of this widely known holiday, she was came to the conclusion that the holiday’s commercialization had gotten out of hand. From then on, she attempted to get rid it from the calendar. “…By 1920 she had become disgusted with how the holiday had been commercialized. She outwardly denounced the transformation and urged people to stop buying Mother’s Day flowers, cards and candies.”

In order to pursuit this goal, she held a campaign that fought against people who had the occupation of sweets, florists, and charities. She spent most of her wealth trying to sue the people who used the ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ line and everything related to Mother’s Day. By 1948, the time of her death, Jarvis wanted everything gone that was related to the holiday, and even went to the government to see it gone from the American calendar.

Even though others had celebrated and rejoiced before Mother’s Day was official, it will always be a day celebrated by people all over the world to make moms feel loved and special by their children.