![[ A Mother's Day of Your Own Making - The Splurge Surge ] ~ from Monterey Bay Spice]()
the splurge surge
How we celebrate Mother’s Day hasn’t changed much since inception of the official holiday, but how we define motherhood since then has changed a great deal. While we may still hold the traditional “June Cleaver” model dear, nearly 10 million women in the US are challenged with raising their children solo, and approximately half of married women, or roughly 5 million, are stay-at-home moms. Collectively, almost 45 million American women are on the receiving end of breakfast in bed, a necklace made of macaroni, or a bouquet of flowers on the second Sunday in May. (1)
On the commercial side of things, spoiling mom is big business. Mother’s Day spending in 2017 reached record levels, topping out at $23.6 billion laid out for everything from greeting cards to gardening tools. Not surprisingly, greeting cards top the list of purchases each year, with flowers and brunch following close behind. The majority of gifts, more than 60%, are intended for mothers and stepmothers, followed by wives, daughters, and others, including a generous 9.2% of gifts purchased for, apparently, no one else at all. (2)
![[ A Mother's Day of Your Own Making - Mother May I? ] ~ from Monterey Bay Spice]()
mother, may i?
Mother’s Day as we know it today is celebrated in May in more than 50 countries around the world, including the United States. Observed on the second Sunday of the month, the exact date changes each year with the lunar calendar, with this year falling on May 13th. But the holiday has had several precursors championed by different women of different eras. The first of which was Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia, who organized Mother’s Day Work Clubs in the 1850s to improve infant mortality by coaching mothers in the best sanitation practices of the time. During the Civil War, these women also nursed both Union and Confederate wounded soldiers, and in 1868 Jarvis gathered mothers together for the first Mother’s Friendship Day picnic, along with their sons and former soldiers from both sides in an effort to mend a divided nation. In 1870, Julia Ward Howe, the abolitionist and poet who penned the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” furthered the effort by establishing Mother’s Peace Day with her Mother’s Day Proclamation that called on mothers of all nations to abolish war.
It was the work of Anna Jarvis, daughter of Ann Reeves Jarvis, that officially put Mother’s Day on the calendar, although not as she intended it to be celebrated. Upon the death of her own mother, she launched an exhaustive letter writing campaign from her home in Philadelphia that eventually moved President Wilson to declare the day a national holiday in 1914 in “reverence for all mothers.” But Anna, holding firm to her belief that the day should remain an intimate exchange between children and their mothers, and not a day to honor all mothers, passionately rallied against the commercialization of the holiday that quickly ensued. In fact, she put every penny and ounce of energy she had into the fight, eventually succumbing to dementia and passing away in 1948 in a sanitarium at the age of 84. Ironically, she never had children of her own.
