Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms & Moms-To-Be out there! Unfortunately, I won't get to see my mom today, but, like millions of other Americans on every 2nd Sunday in May, I will be calling her today to wish her a happy day today & to let her know how blessed I am that she's my mom!!

Below you will find a short history on Mother's Day from the good folks at Wikipedia, including the fact that it was originally intended by the woman who first thought up the idea in the U.S. shortly after the U.S. Civil War as a day for mothers (& others) to protest the idea of war. You can find a more detailed history of Mother's Day around the world & more info on how the original founder of Mother's Day in the US eventually came to renounce the day due to what she saw as it's over-commercialization at Mother's Day Central at http://www.mothersdaycentral.com/about-mothersday/history/.

The United States celebrates Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Mother's Day was loosely inspired by the British day and was imported by social activist Julia Ward Howe after the American Civil War. However, it was intended as a call to unite women against war. In 1870, she wrote the Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament. Howe failed in her attempt to get formal recognition of a Mother's Day for Peace. Her idea was influenced by Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors.

When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter, named Anna Jarvis, started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10 May 1908, in the church where the elder Ann Jarvis had taught Sunday School. Originally the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, this building is now the International Mother's Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark). From there, the custom caught on — spreading eventually to 45 states. The holiday was declared officially by some states beginning in 1912. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Nine years after the first official Mother's Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother's Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother's Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.