Mother’s Day is an annual holiday celebrated in the United States on the second Moms first valentine’s day in May. Mother’s Day recognizes mothers, motherhood and maternal bonds in general, as well as the positive contributions that they make to their families and society. Internationally, there are a large variety of Mother’s Day celebrations with different origins and traditions, some now also having been influenced by this more recent American tradition.

For the international celebration, see Mother’s Day. During the 19th century, women’s peace groups in the United States tried to establish holidays and regular activities in favor of peace and against war. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War. In 1868, Ann Jarvis, Anna Jarvis’s mother, organised a committee to establish a “Mother’s Friendship Day”, the purpose of which was “to reunite families that had been divided during the Civil War. There were several limited observances in the 1870s and the 1880s but none achieved resonance beyond the local level.

Several years later a Mother’s Day observance on May 13, 1877 was held in Albion, Michigan over a dispute related to the temperance movement. According to local legend, Albion pioneer Juliet Calhoun Blakeley stepped up to complete the sermon of the Rev. Hering, alumnus and administrator at the University of Notre Dame and President of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, made a plea for “setting aside one day in the year as a nationwide memorial to the memories of Mothers and motherhood” in 1904. Mother’s Day Historical Marker at Market and N. In its present form, Mother’s Day was established by Anna Jarvis with the help of Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker following the death of her mother, Ann Jarvis, on May 9, 1905. Jarvis never mentioned Howe or Mothering Sunday, and she never mentioned any connection to the Protestant school celebrations, always claiming that the creation of Mother’s Day was hers alone.

A small service was held on May 12, 1907 in the Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna’s mother had been teaching Sunday school. Jarvis then campaigned to establish Mother’s Day first as a U. The holiday was declared officially by the state of West Virginia in 1910, and the rest of the states followed quickly. On May 10, 1913, the U. On May 8, 1914, the U.

In 1912 Anna Jarvis trademarked the phrases “Second Sunday in May” and “Mother’s Day”, and created the Mother’s Day International Association. She specifically noted that “Mother’s” should “be a singular possessive, for each family to honor its own mother, not a plural possessive commemorating all mothers in the world. Traditions on Mother’s Day include churchgoing, the distribution of carnations, and family dinners. Mother’s Day is the third largest holiday in the United States for sending cards. Carnations have come to represent Mother’s Day since Anna Jarvis delivered 500 of them at the first celebration in 1908. Mother’s Day is now one of the most commercially successful American occasions, having become the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States and generating a significant portion of the U.