Mother’s Day is celebrated in every country of the world. On this day we celebrate all these fantastic women we have the honor to call Mom, Maman or Mama, but also for all the mother figures we can have in our lives. We celebrate the women who will always be there for us and will always love us. Through this article let’s have an overview of how this day was born and how we celebrate it nowadays.
Origins
Greek celebration
If we want to go back to the very first origins of Mother’s Day, there is no doubt we should mention the celebration of the goddesses Gaia and Rhea. Gaia was the personification of nature and gave birth to several popular gods. She was in some sort the first mother of the world. The worship then passed on her daughter Rhea, Zeus’s wife, and embodied nature and fertility. In ancient Greece people used to worship many gods and Rhea was considered as the “Mother of the Gods”. Worshipping her was basically worshipping fertility, maternity and renewal.
Roman celebration
The Romans also had their special day of celebration concerning the celebration of a goddess mother figure. On the first March of each year, the Romans celebrated the Matronalia in honour of the birth of Rome, the return of spring, children and mothers. The celebration was created to remember the reconciliation between the Sabines and the Romans, which happened thanks to women after the event of the Abduction of the Sabines Women. The 1st of March was also the anniversary of the worship of Juno, protector of the brides, fertility and renewal. On this day, matrons received gifts from their husbands before going to the temple of Juno, where they offered flowers to the goddess.
Modern origins
The local celebrations
If we want to understand how Mother’s Day became an international celebration, we should look at the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is at this period of time that Mother’s Day became very popular and spread out through the world. Of course there had already been many celebrations for mothers, but almost all of them were local celebrations, so centered in one city or an area only. For example, around 1870, Julia Ward Howe demanded Mother’s Day to be established and celebrated each year. The celebration happened in Boston one day per year during the following decade but died soon after. There is also a woman at the end of the nineteenth century, Juliet Calhoun Blakely, who initiated Mother’s Day in Michigan, during which her sons celebrated her each year.
The founding event
The true creator of Mother's Day is the American Anna Jarvis. In 1907 in West Virginia, USA, Anna Jarvis organized a private Mother’s Day celebration for her deceased mother. One year later, she organized another church service and more than 400 children and mothers attended the service. Ever since, Anna Jarvis multiplicated initiatives to have an official Mother’s Day in the US. Most of the states of the country ratified this special day in their public holidays. In May 1914, the president Woodrow Wilson officially signed the creation of Mother’s Day, celebrated on the second Sunday of May of each year. His goal was to answer, on the one hand, the aim to establish a day of gratitude towards mothers, and on the other hand to soothe and gather the American people divided by european tensions a few months before World War One.
Mother’s Day traditions nowadays
Mother’s Day in the rest of the world
Many countries adopted the same day as the United States to celebrate Mother’s Day in May. However, others celebrate it on different days. For example, Norway celebrates Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of February while in Argentina it is on the third Sunday of October. Some countries also celebrate Mother’s Day on a date which has a historical significance. Bolivia’s Mother’s Day is on 27th of May, in memory of a battle in which women defended their children. Also, in Bulgaria and Serbia, Mother’s Day is celebrated on the 8th of March, the same day as International Women’s Day.
What do we do on Mother’s Day
There are many ways to express your love, gratitude and respect to your mother or mother figure on Mother’s Day. Generally, children offer small presents like cakes, flowers, poems, jewelry or even handmade objects. This is also a day where many phone calls are given from children, young and less young, to their mothers if they live far away from each other. Mother’s Day is also a wonderful occasion where families gather for a family brunch, lunch or dinner at home or in a restaurant.
To sum up, Mother’s Day traditions go back to Antiquity when people celebrated goddesses of fertility and motherhood. This day is a special day to celebrate mothers of all kinds of the planet, showing them our love for them as well as care and attention.
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Emma
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