Celebrate Mother’s Day with love

Some holidays, like Thanksgiving, are unique to the United States. Others, like Mother’s Day, are celebrated on various days in various ways by nations around the world. The U.S. is among some 52 countries that celebrate Mother’s Day today, the second Sunday in May.

In addition to the U.S., Hungary, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan, Panama, Sweden, United Kingdom and Ireland also celebrate Mother’s Day, though not necessarily today.

It makes sense that Mother’s Day is a day celebrated internationally: Each of us has a mother. And that alone seems worth celebrating.

In the U.S., Mother’s Day traces its roots to Ann Jarvis, who in 1868 created a committee to establish a “Mother’s Friendship Day” to reunite families divided by the Civil War. She died in 1905 without seeing the fruits of her efforts, though.

So her daughter Anna Jarvis continued the push until President Woodrow Wilson made the day an official national holiday in 1914. He proclaimed it as a day for American citizens to display the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Less than a decade later, Jarvis was so disgusted by the commercialization of the day she devoted the rest of her life and her inheritance to fighting against what she saw as the commercial abuses of a day created for individual families to honor their mothers.

Her efforts to curb the commercial focus of the day failed. In the U.S., the day remains one of the biggest days for purchases of flowers, greeting cards, meals out and long-distance phone calls.

For example, according to the research firm IBISWorld, Americans will spend approximately $2.6 billion on jewelry, $2.3 billion on flowers, $1.64 billion on gift certificates and another $68 million on greeting cards celebrating this year. And they say that’s a 3.7 percent increase from 2010.

No doubt Jarvis would cringe at how we’ve come to mark Mother’s Day. In her lifetime, she railed against commercial greeting cards as a lazy substitute for writing a personal letter. And before her death in 1948, she also was arrested for disturbing the peace while protesting the commercialization of Mother’s Day.

Two generations of the Jarvis family worked to establish this day as a time for each family to honor their mothers; thus, it is Mother’s Day, not Mothers’ Day.

Far be it for us to dictate how anyone celebrates this holiday. Though we do agree with what seems to be the Jarvis family’s motivation to set aside the day — paying homage to the many roles of motherhood.

They are our first teachers. They tend our wounds. Read us books. Introduced us to solid and other new foods. They offer council. They dry our tears. They love us endlessly, and by doing so teach us how to be mothers ourselves.

For these and the countless other blessings our mothers have bestowed on us, we pause today to say thank you the best way we know how, by living the loving ways you taught us.

Happy Mother’s Day.