Parent Ministry Sermons - The Mother of Mother’s Day

Parent Ministry
Sermons - The
Mother of
Mother’s Day
A history of the
Mother of
Mother's Day
www.CreativeYouthIdeas.com
www.CreativeHolidayIdeas.com

Attributed to Paul Harvey?
Anna May Jarvis, quote:
“Mother’s Day has nothing to do
with candy. Candy is junk. You
give your mother a box of candy
and then go home and eat most
of it yourself….”

Anna May Jarvis, quote:
“A maudlin, insincere printed card
or a ready-made telegram means
nothing except that you’re too lazy
to write to the woman who has
done more for you than anyone
else in the world. You ought to go
home and see your mother on
Mother’s Day. You ought to take her
out and paint the town red….”

Anna May Jarvis, still quoting now:
“You ought to give her something
useful, something permanent. A lot
of mothers are sleeping on
mattresses that are as hard as rocks.
Maybe she needs new
eyeglasses, comfortable shoes, a pair
of slippers, or better lighting fixtures.
Is she sleeping warm at night? Could
she use an eiderdown? Maybe the
stairs in her home need fixing. . . .”

What about flowers, Anna May?
“Flowers are about half dead by
the time they’re delivered.”
And Anna May goes on to say
that she won’t rest “until
Mother’s Day becomes the
personal family Memorial Day it
was intended to be.”

If anyone had the right to speak out
against the commercialization of
Mother’s Day, it was Anna May
Jarvis. That second Sunday of
thoughtfulness each and every May
was Anna’s idea in the first place.
Anna May Jarvis was the Mother of
Mother’s Day. Anna May Jarvis,
born May 1, 1864.

She was a minister’s
daughter, described as a
quiet, studious girl in school who
liked everyone and whom everyone
liked. Anna was just two weeks forty-
two, working for a life insurance
company in Philadelphia, when her
mother died on the second Sunday
of May, 1906. Friends noticed a
change in Anna in the months
following that unhappy occasion. No
longer the gentle, easygoing woman
they knew, Anna became obsessed
with but one desire: to see her
mother and motherhood honored
annually throughout the world.

After more than a year of careful
planning, Anna arranged the first
Mother’s Day church service-May 10,
1908-at St. Andrew’s Methodist Church
in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna’s
mother had taught Sunday school.
Anna worked hard to promote her
idea. A year after that first memorial
service in West Virginia, Philadelphia
became the first city to proclaim an
official Mother’s Day. Three years
passed. West Virginia made Mother’s
Day a statewide observance. One year
later, in 1914, President Woodrow
Wilson signed a proclamation from
Congress-a document recorded as
Public Resolution 25-to establish the
second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day
forevermore.

And it had all begun with Anna. But
Anna, now fifty years old, was not
content with her victory. She retired
from her job at the insurance company
to spend her remaining thirty-four
years, and her entire fortune of over a
hundred thousand dollars, campaigning
against the commercialization of the
day she had founded in honor of
motherhood. She interrupted florists’
conventions to express her remorse at
their “profiteering”; wherever there
was a forum for her cause, she spoke
out. Then one day, when she was too
old and too tired to speak out, she was
placed penniless, deaf and blind in a
West Chester, Pennsylvania, sanitarium.
She died there in November of 1948;
she was eightyfour.

And if the story of the woman who
invented Mother’s Day is made even
more poignant, it is by the fact that
she, Anna, would never benefit from
that time of remembrance. For
Anna May Jarvis-the Mother of
Mother’s Day, who devoted her life
and her fortune to its reverent
observance-was never married and
was never a mother.

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Parent Ministry Sermons - The Mother of Mother’s Day

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