This year, "Mother's Day" or better known as "Mother's Day" is celebrated on Sunday, May 12. It is a celebration that honors the mother of the family, as well as motherhood, maternal bonds and the influence of mothers in society. It is usually celebrated in many parts of the world, mostly in the months of March or May.
Holidays in honor of the mother have been known since ancient times in our country. Mother Earth appears in Greek mythology as the first mother who was worshiped as a deity and was the mother of all. But Rhea was also worshiped as the goddess of earth, nature and fertility and was the first mother to give birth and give breast milk to her children to raise them.
However, the roots of Mother's Day as we know it today lie back in the 19th century, in the United States. In the years before the American Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis from West Virginia, USA, helped establish Mother's Day Work Clubs, teaching local women how to properly care for their children.
Later, these clubs became a unifying force in an area of the country still divided during the civil war. In 1868, Anne Jarvis founded a movement called "Mothers' Friendship Day", in which mothers met with ex-soldiers of both fronts to promote their reconciliation.
However, the official Mother's Day appeared in the 1900s, as a result of the effort of Anna Jarvis's daughter, Anna Jarvis, to honor the work started by her mother. After her mother's death in 1905, Anna Jarvis organized the first Mother's Day celebration in May 1908 at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia.
After the success of that first celebration, Jarvis, who remained single and childless her entire life, was able to see the holiday earn a place on the national calendar. Arguing that American holidays were based on male achievement, she began a campaign of sending mass letters to newspapers and prominent politicians, urging the adoption of a special day of honor for motherhood.
In 1912, her persistence paid off and then-President of the United States Woodrow Wilson officially established the second Sunday in May as Ημέρα της Μητέρας.
The only paradox of this beautiful story seems to be the fact that by 1920 and after so much struggle to recognize this day, Jarvis watched the commercialization of the holiday by card companies and florists. This fact, by the time of her death in 1948, led her to lobby the government to remove the holiday from calendars entirely.
