MAY 9, 2021 – If only I’d read about Anna Jarvis, the force behind Mother’s Day in the U.S., before I bought my wife a card and big present! I’ll explain in a bit, but first, a bit o’ history.
Ms. Jarvis first celebrated Mother’s Day after her own beloved mother died in 1905. The mom, a West Virginian, had been a peace activist during the Civil War, working both sides of the divide. After holding the first Mother’s Day worship service at her Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, WV, daughter Jarvis took the campaign to Congress. The stuffy, clubby retrograde white guys, however, laughed her away and joked that if they were to create a “Mother’s Day,” they’d have to establish a “Mother-in-law Day,” which they definitely weren’t inclined to do.
Anna took to the road, and by 1911, Mother’s Day was celebrated in all 46 states (Arizona, New Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii hadn’t yet earned their stars). It was then that President Woodrow Wilson acknowledged the inevitable and issue a proclamation making the second Sunday in May the nation’s official “Mother’s Day.”
But not all would be right with the world for long, and I’m not referring only to the catastrophe of the Great War, which got underway in 1914. Led by Hallmark, enterprises across the country got into the business of making Mother’s Day a good day for . . . business. Carnation growers and candy manufacturers turned their sales around, and retail outfits of all kinds soon jumped on the commercial bandwagon. By all of this profit motive, Jarvis was scandalized.
Following in her mother’s footsteps, she took to activism, and protested a confectioners convention in Philadelphia in 1923. Two years later she disrupted a gathering of the American War Mothers, who raised her hackles by selling carnations—by then the symbol of Mother’s Day—to raise money. The daughter of a peacenik was arrested for disturbing the peace of an outfit born of war.
Only in America.
Yet, after all, this was, well . . . America—a confederation of 48 states (supplemental “territories”) that one year later elected Calvin “Laconic” Coolidge president—a guy whose most memorable line was, “The business of America is business.”
All of which takes me back to the beginning: if only I’d known about Anna Jarvis before I went out and bought—for my wife—a Mother’s Day Hallmark card and a little gift so big I couldn’t fit it into the trunk of my car. As the recipient mother herself said only yesterday to our five-year-old grand-daughter, “What moms like most is a hand-made card!”
Except . . . somehow I don’t think my wife would have appreciated so much a hand-made card coming from me.
As it turns out, we Americans are all in this together—where the business of our country is business. Besides, my card and gift were a hit. My wife is one helluva mom to our kids and deserves far more than my crude drawing on a folded page from her home office printer tray.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
