Take Back Mother’s Day!

by Julia Parker, from the April 2005 Newsletter

Don’t panic! Mother’s Day is next month. I just wanted to get Moscow ready to take back Mother’s Day. (It’s May 8th to be exact – put it on your calendar.)

Someone told me a few years ago that Mother’s Day was “a Hallmark holiday.” He’s just lucky that my memory is shot, and I can’t remember who he was! His inference was that Mother’s Day was just a manufactured holiday to put more money into the corporate coffers. He was wrong. Mother’s Day has become a manufactured holiday to put more money into the corporate coffers – but it didn’t start that way. Mother’s Day is radical! Not radical like cool, slick, or nifty, or crackalacking (as my 4 year old now says) but radical like left wing, tree-hugging, peace-loving radical. In fact, the U.S. version of Mother’s Day was started in the name of peace.

Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” envisioned Mother’s Day as a day to promote peace in 1872. In the early 1900s, Anna Jarvis campaigned to make Mother’s Day an official holiday. However, after Mother’s Day became an official U.S. holiday in 1914, Anna Jarvis was soon horrified by its commercialization. In 1923, she began to lobby to rescind the official status of Mother’s Day. Shortly before she died at the age of 84, she told a reporter that she had intended Mother’s Day to be a day of remembrance, “not of profit,” and that she wished she had never started it.

So this year for Mother’s Day, don’t buy Ma a bobble, or a $4.00 Hallmark card, do something to promote peace, and do something to thank your Mama. After all, she really did change your diapers.

You can use the accompanying illustration to create a bookmark for your mother. You can save it, resize it in a graphics program, color it in your computer or after printing, glue it to a thin piece of cardboard and make your own peaceful Mother’s Day drawing on the back. Tell your mother about the origins of Mother’s Day in the U.S., and have a peaceful day. (Oh, and cleaning up your room wouldn’t hurt either.)

See these Web sites for more information about Mother’s day:

www.twilightbridge.com/hobbies/festivals/mother/history.htm
www.ehow.com/how_16110_teach-kids-origins.html

See these Web sites for more information about peace organizations:

www.peacemothers.homestead.com
www.newdream.org
www.palousepeace.org

Julia Parker is a peace-loving mother with a peace-loving mother. Last month, she promised to provide bail money if her parents get arrested at a North Carolina peace march.

Copyright: Copyright on articles and recipes are jointly held by the Moscow Food Co-op and the respective authors, except were otherwise noted.

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