Fun Facts About Mother’s Day

Check out these fun facts about Mother’s Day.

• The earliest Mother's Day celebrations can be traced back to the spring celebrations of ancient Greece in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods.
• During the 1600's, England celebrated a day called "Mothering Sunday", celebrated on the 4th Sunday of Lent. This was a time put aside for relaxation and enjoyment during the long Lenten fast. Servants would go home to see their families, bringing cakes and sweets to their moms. This custom was called "going a-mothering". Each mother would receive a simnel-cake (Latin for "fine flour) and mother's would give a blessing to their children.
• In 1870 a female activist, writer and poet by the name of Julia Ward (she wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”) suggested a day of peace and strongly advocated other women to stand up against the war. From this plea she was able to get Boston to recognize mothers on the second Sunday of June.

• The first Mother's Day was celebrated in 1908. Anna Jarvis honored her mother Ann Jarvis with a memorial. Ann Jarvis had started a committee in 1868 to establish ‘Mother's Friendship Day'. Her motivation had been to reunite families after the Civil War. She died in 1905, before Mother's Day became a holiday.
• Woodrow Wilson signed Mother's Day into law in 1914.
• In what was formerly Yugoslavia, children would tie up their mother on Mother’s Day. The only way she could get free would be to pay her children with treats.
• Anna Jarvis would later try to stop what Mother's Day became. The holiday quickly became a commercialized opportunity for producers to sell flowers, candies, and cards. Anna Reeves Jarvis felt this was detracting from the personal and intimate aspects of the holiday and defied this by starting boycotts, walkouts, and even condemned first lady Eleanor Roosevelt for using the day as a means of fundraising. Reeves Jarvis would eventually use all her money in this fight, and died at the age of 84 in a sanatorium.
• In 2018, over $23 Billion was spent on Mother's Day.
• Mother's Day is the busiest day of the year for restaurants. In 2018 about 87 million adults made plans to go to a restaurant for Mother's Day.
• Mother's Day is the third highest selling holiday for flowers and plants (after Christmas and Hanukkah).
• The carnation is the flower most often associated with Mother’s Day. Red and pink carnations for moms who are still living, and white carnations for mothers that have passed away.
• The moniker 'Mom' comes from babies. The first thing a baby can vocalize is the 'ma' sound, which is why in almost every language the word for mother begins with the letter 'M' or is some iteration of the 'ma' sound.
• In the vast majority of the world’s languages, the word for “mother” begins with the letter M.
• The most popular gift for Mother's Day is the greeting card. Every Mother's Day there are approximately 152 million Mother's Day cards sent.
• An AT&T survey estimated that 122.5 million phone calls to Mom are made on Mother's Day. Other Mother's Day findings revealed that 11 percent of people never call their mothers, and 3 percent of the 68 percent planning to ring Mom up called her collect.