Mothers Day Activities - The Mother of Mother’s Day

Mothers Day
Activities - 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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Mothers Day Activities - The Mother of Mother’s Day

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