Happy Mother’s Day MamaBears!

Happy Mother’s Day. Feliz Dia de las Madres. Furaha Ya Mama Sikun. No Matter what language you speak the meaning is universal: Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. We love you. You are the glue of our family and we are grateful.

Moms are celebrated in many countries on different dates and in different ways. While Mother’s Day traditions and customs vary, everyone knows how important it is to honor moms for everything they do all year long, but Mother’s day is the one day out of the year when children, young and old, try to show in a tangible way how much they appreciate their mothers.

England was one of the first countries to set aside a day to recognize mothers. In the eighteenth century when many people worked as household servants for the rich, “Mothering Sunday” was reserved for them to return home to be with their mothers.

The idea for a day set aside to honor Mother’s in the U.S. did not truly occur until the early 1900s when Anna Jarvis began campaigning for the creation of an official Mother’s Day after the loss of her mother on May 5, 1905.

Anna was determined to honor her mother so she asked the minister at her church in West Virginia to give a sermon in remembrance. On the same Sunday in Philadelphia, their minister honored Mrs. Jarvis and all mothers with a special Mother’s Day service. Soon after, Anna Jarvis began writing to congressmen, asking them to set aside a day to honor mothers. In 1910, the governor of West Virginia proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and in 1914 the bill passed in Congress.  President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill, declaring the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day – forever establishing Mother’s Day as an official holiday in the U.S.

Did you know…

• The National Retail Foundation predicts Mother’s Day is a $14 billion industry
• Google Trends shows a sharp spike in search traffic for Mother’s Day on Mother’s Day in the US and UK and the month leading up to it
• Florists see their biggest sales in May   
• Flowers are believed to be one of the most popular gifts to send Mom on Mother’s Day largely in part because Anna Jarvis handed out carnations to the church-goers during the original days of celebrating Mother’s Day
• US restaurants claim that it is the busiest day of the year
• Long Distance telephone calls peak on this day
• The US Postal Service experiences increased volume during the surrounding days of Mother’s Day
• The International Mother’s Day Shrine is a church in Grafton, West Virginia, was the site of the first unofficial Mother’s Day celebration as created by Anna Jarvis, May 10, 1907
• More than 83 million mothers are living today in the United States according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  There are approximately 2 billion mothers living worldwide.
• Modern moms have an average family size of two children, while mothers in the 1950s had an average of 3-5 children, and in the 1700s, women gave birth to an average of 7-10 children!

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