Happy Mother’s Day to everyone!!

Painting by Amorsolo entitled “Ina at Anak” 

This is the time of year where everyone has to pause and thank their mothers. Send them flowers, take them out to dinner, send them to a Spa for the day to get pampered. They have given their lives to us, made sacrifices for our benefit. It’s time that they be recognized.

I was researching the history of Mother’s Day over the net and found the interesting beginnings of this most beloved day of commemoration. I thought it would be nice to share with all of you! Happy Mother’s Day!!

Jarvis’ “Mother’s Day”

In 1907, Mother’s Day was first celebrated in a small, private way by Anna Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate the anniversary of her mother’s death two years earlier on May 9, 1905. Jarvis’s mother, named Ann Jarvis, had been active in Mother’s Day campaigns for peace and worker’s safety and health since end of American Civil War. The younger Jarvis launched a quest to get wider recognition of Mother’s Day. The celebration organized by Jarvis on May 10, 1908 involved 407 children with their mothers at the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton (this church is now the Mother’s Day Shrine]). Grafton is, thus, the place recognized as the birthplace of Mother’s Day.

The subsequent campaign to recognize Mother’s Day was financed by Philadelphia clothing merchant John Wanamaker. As the custom of Mother’s Day spread, the emphasis shifted from the pacifism and reform movements to a general appreciation of mothers. The first official recognition of the holiday was by West Virginia in 1910. A proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day was signed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson on May 14, 1914.

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