The Truth About, “Mother’s Day!”
• Mother’s Day is the 3rd most important U.S. holiday to retailers in consumer expenditure at roughly 20 billion dollars per holiday.
• Mother’s Day has the highest restaurant sales beating out Valentines Day.
• Mother’s day is the 3rd strongest in church attendance after Easter and Christmas.
• The start of Mother’s Day dates back to 1858.
• Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis started “Mother’s Friendship Day” to help reunite families that became separated during the Civil War.
• During a typhoid outbreak, Ann organized what she called, “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” to improve health and sanitation problems with both the Union and Confederate Armies.
• In the process of creating an annual Mother’s Day celebration, Ann passed away in 1905 not being able to establish this holiday.
• Ann, being an inspirational Mother, Anna Jarvis, Ann’s daughter, picked up the torch and followed in her mother’s footsteps.
• On May 12th, 1907, In the Andrews Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where her Mother Ann had taught Sunday S
• On May 10th, 1908, “Mother’s Day” was celebrated at the same church, but also at her friends John’s, “Wanamaker Auditorium” in Philadelphia.
• West Virginia was the first State to make it an official holiday in 1910 and other States quickly followed.
• A resolution passed on May 10th, of 1913 for all federal government officials to wear a white carnation in observation of Mother’s Day.
• The U.S. Congress passed a law on May 8th, 1914 making the second Sunday in May officially Mother’s Day and approved by President Woodrow Wilson the following day.
• The church where Mother’s Day started is now the International Mother’s Day Shrine, a shrine to all mothers, and was designated as a National Historical Landmarked on October 5th, of 1992.
• Anna hated the commercialization of this special holiday and fought the remainder of her life to promote what this day was truly about, “A day to not only honor your mother but all mothers and what they sacrifice and do.”
• Not having any children of her own, the founder of Mother’s Day would never become a Mother herself.
• Anna died on November 24th, 1948 alone in the Marshall Square Sanitarium in West Chester, Pennsylvania at the age 84, broke and blind.
• She now rests beside her mother, brother, and sister in the West Laurel Hill Cemetery, near Philadelphia.
On this special holiday day, honor mothers everywhere for their unconditional love, dedication to others, their self-sacrifice, and their accomplishments. We love you!
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