On Point: How Mother's Day became motherless

 Ted Streuli, The Daily Record Newswire

One century. That’s how long Mother’s Day has been an official celebration, all thanks to Anna Jarvis.

Jarvis, originally of Grafton, West Virginia, had a little shindig to honor her own mother in 1908 and promptly began campaigning to make it a thing. In 1912 she trademarked the phrase, specifying that it was singular possessive, because the day was for each family to honor its own mother, not all mothers of the world. And that’s just how President Woodrow Wilson spelled it on the proclamation in 1914. In that document, Wilson called upon all government officials to “display the United States flag on all public buildings” and asked the people of the United States to “display the flag at their homes or other suitable places on the second Sunday in May as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.”

Your mother might be reading this, so you might want to take a moment to go put the flag out. It’s OK. I’ll wait.

Americans spend $68 million on Mother’s Day greeting cards, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts such as spa packages, and about $2.6 billion on flowers. The National Restaurant Association says 80 million of us will eat out on Mother’s Day, making it the busiest restaurant day of the year. Take note before you make a reservation (as though you could still get one): A National Restaurant Association Survey showed that only 19 percent of moms prefer going out for brunch, while 34 percent want steak, seafood or barbecue.

According to the Society of American Florists, 24 percent of all retail floral sales happen for Mother’s Day and bring in 25 percent of the revenue. The Greeting Card Association says we will send 133 million Mother’s Day cards, and that’s not counting the ones your first-grader made with Crayolas depicting you as a stick figure the height of a three-story house. It’s not quite as many cards as are sold for Valentine’s Day (145 million), but it’s a whole lot more than we send Dad (90 million).

There are two live trademarks at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. One, filed in 2007 but not used until 2009, belongs to Greensource Brand Apparel, a Renton, Washington, company that makes organic apparel. The other, filed in 2009, belongs to MaDonna White, who does business as Hidden Wineries Inc. in Temecula, California, and has a coffee-table book of a similar name.

Despite her trademarking prowess, Jarvis despised the commercialization of the holiday, and by her death in 1948 had denounced it. Her mother, Ann Jarvis, had tried to start a memorial day for mothers during the Civil War, and Anna ran with the idea after Ann’s 1905 death. Anna envisioned a day where people would attend church, and in 1908 she handed out carnations, her mother’s favorite flower, with the idea that those with living mothers would wear red or pink and those whose mothers had died would wear a white one. She thought that after church, children would draft hand-written, personal notes for their mothers.

By the 1920s the greeting card and floral industries had seen the potential. Jarvis hated the commercialization of the holiday and actively fought against it, organizing boycotts and protests. Her anti-Mother’s Day campaign was ferocious; she crashed a candy-makers convention in Philadelphia in 1923 and in 1925 became so unruly at a Philadelphia carnation sale to benefit American War Mothers she was arrested for disturbing the peace. Her fight against her own holiday wiped out her sizable inheritance.

Jarvis could have made a fortune from her idea, but died penniless and suffering from dementia in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium at age 84.

Anna Jarvis never married. She had no children.