Mothers at Center of Observance of Mother's Day
Byline: BRENDA PIQUERO
Children everywhere will honor mothers today, Mothers Day, for their priceless gift of motherhood, and their continuing guidance and presence that make them the heart of both home and family.
Roses, chocolates, handmade letters of love and affection will pour into the living rooms of ancestral homes from daughters, sons, and grandchildren in paying tribute to mothers, who, as homemakers, not only rocked their cradles and enriched their lives, but provided them with warm memories to last a lifetime.
Land-line telephones and cellphones will keep ringing the whole day from children who are unable to come home for Mothers Day, first celebrated in ancient Greece to honor Rhea, the mother of the gods. But it was an American woman, Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia in the United States, who first campaigned to establish a special day to honor mothers which caught national attention.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, recognizing the growing public awareness to hold a special day for the American nations mothers, proclaimed the second Sunday of May as Mothers Day in the US.
Jarvis mounted the campaign for a Mothers Day celebration in memory of her own mother two years after she died in 1905. In her crusade, she asked families to wear carnations on their lapels on Mothers Day. She wanted to honor her mother for taking the effort to establish a "Mothers Friendship Day" in the late 19th century as the roadmap to heal the wounds and scars of the Civil War.
Jarvis never became a mother herself, and died in 1945 at the age of 84 in a lonely room of a nursing home feeling bitter over the commercial profit that had overwhelmed the noble intention of setting aside a special day a year as Mothers Day.
Although it was Jarvis campaign effort being given credit for the national celebration of Mothers Day in the United States, it was another American, Julia Ward Howe, who first suggested a Mothers Day holiday in 1872.
Having written the words for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," Howe somehow felt that a special day dedicated to mothers could be a potent instrument towards peace. Since President Wilsons proclamation of the second Sunday of May as Mothers Day, the American holiday has been swiftly adapted in Europe, Turkey, Australia, the Philippines, and China.
The Philippines, being a Marian country, finds May a special month of offering flowers to the Blessed Mother. Celebrating Mothers Day on the second Sunday of May adds a higher dimension to many Filipino families as they join the world in the now global celebration that first saw the light of day in ancient Greece.
Todays celebration is paying honor to mothers everywhere for having cast a permanent shadow of the sweet and priceless gift of motherhood.
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