Happy Mother's Day!

Today the United States celebrates mothers, as we take our moms out for dinner and buy them flowers or chocolate or whatever. It's important to appreciate our mothers because, cliched as it is, none of us would be here without them. I didn't know that such a place existed until I did a little googling, but The International Mother's Day Shrine has some history of the holiday. They try to tie the holiday into the Civil War, which these days should be right up my alley, but quite frankly, the connection seems a little tenuous to me. I'll get to their origin in a moment, but first we can jump over to MothersDayCentral.com, which says that Julia Ward Howe, the author of the lyrics to "Battle Hymn of the Republic," wrote a poem that called for a day honoring mothers in 1870. That's not too bad of a Civil War tie, except for the fact that it never caught on. So instead, we're back with the shrine, which says on its history page, that ninety-nine years ago, a woman, Anna Jarvis, sponsored a Mother's Day celebration in honor of her mother who'd passed away three years earlier. Ann Jarvis, the mother, had worked as a nurse and for sanitary conditions during the Civil War. The first Mother's Day was celebrated at Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Jarvis's mother had taught Sunday school. The idea caught on very quickly, and the governor of West Virginia picked up on it two years later. Finally, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made it a national holiday.

The rapid rise of Mother's Day didn't please everyone, however. Anna Jarvis felt that the pure celebration of mothers became too commercial too quickly and protested. She sued to have one Mother's Day event stopped, and she was later arrested for disturbing the peace at another. So in honor of Anna Jarvis and her true intention in founding Mother's Day, don't buy anything for your mother--just thank her.