Book of Days

I love finding the disjunction in things: you know, what is it about something, anything, that is not quite right? It is often finding the disjunction that leads to really understanding a great painting, for instance, or offers some new insight into a poem or a story. And this may be at the heart of what I love about seasonal celebrations, because they are chock full of disjunction, mostly coming out of a church appropriating an old pagan holiday while the people cling stubbornly to their old ways, even centuries later.

But here we are with Mother’s Day, a benign enough holiday to be sure, a secular one, created only one century ago. In fact, this year marks the official 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day in this country. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson designated the Second Sunday of May as an official holiday recognizing our mothers. Behind Woodrow Wilson’s action was Anna Jarvis, a West Virginia woman whose life was consumed by Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis championed the establishment and recognition of the holiday with great passion. But once the day was out of the box, as it were, it took on a life of its own. By 1920, Mother’s Day was already far too commercial for Anna, and she spent the rest of her life militantly fighting that commercialism. So, what do you do with a problem like Anna Jarvis?

Mother’s Day has its roots in the 1850s when Jarvis’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, organized women’s groups to aid in the Civil War, on both sides, both Union and Confederate. She called them Mother’s Day Work Clubs. After Ann’s passing in 1905, her daughter Anna sought to memorialize her mother with the idea that each person would honor their own mother, too. She did this in Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. She was living there in Philadelphia, but Mother’s Day was also observed that year at a little church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna was raised, that same day. Anna began making the observance of Mother’s Day her life’s work, and she was a great success at it. It took only six years more before Mother’s Day was being celebrated nationally.

But Anna soon came to despise her creation. Florists, candy shops, and a burgeoning greeting card industry were all quick to jump on the Mother’s Day bandwagon, and nothing irritated Anna Jarvis more. In her eyes, Mother’s Day was a day to go home and spend with your mom. Plain and simple. Anything more than that was sacrilege and she grew more and more adamant about this as the years progressed. She organized boycotts and public demonstrations and she was even arrested once or twice for disturbing the peace after crashing trade shows touting Mother’s Day gifts. Anna fought the commercialization of Mother’s Day with every last penny of her rather large inheritance, and she died broke and probably insane in 1948 at a Philadelphia sanitarium. One can picture her last words, as she struggled for air, being something about Mother’s Day. It’s a safe bet, I’d say, that they were.

I used to work for Hallmark, back when my heart was two sizes too small, and the fact is that Mother’s Day sales account for more greeting cards sold than any other holiday save Christmas and Valentine’s Day. It is one of the more impossible days to get a good table at a restaurant. Does your mother expect these things? I don’t know. If your mother is like my mother, she is probably saying, “Please, no gifts. I have enough stuff. Just come spend the day with me.” Certainly we all have enough stuff. Why burden your mother with more? All that Anna Jarvis (and most likely your mother, too) asks is that you go pay your mother a visit. Anna will smile upon you if you do, and so will your mother.

Image: That’s me and my mom, waiting patiently for something good… And in the next frame a birthday cake appears before us. It was my second birthday.