Mother’s Day is usually celebrated in May. For 2024, Mother’s Day is slated to be celebrated on May 12 (second Sunday of the Month. Mother’s Day is one of the most special occasions that we have on our calendar. It is a festival that goes beyond all religions, ethnicities, and cultures. Everyone, everywhere in the world can celebrate Mother’s Day. However, every country doesn’t celebrate Mother’s Day on a fixed date. It is usually in May, but it can vary based on the country. We will find out more in this post.

Mother’s Day: Important Things To Know

Mother’s Day has been celebrated for thousands of years in one form or another

The origin of this festival goes back much further than we can imagine. The Ancient Egyptians started worshipping Isis as the “Great Mother Goddess” about 4000 years ago. although it was not until Ancient Greece that they began to worship Rhea, mother of Olympus. This tradition was also adopted by the Romans, who began to worship the goddess Cybele, the Mother goddess, for three days a year, to whom they brought flowers.

Mother’s Day was once celebrated in December

May hasn’t always been the month when Mother’s Day is celebrated. In 1854, Pope Pius IX decided to establish December 8 as the day of tribute to the Virgin Mary, defining it as the well-known day of the Immaculate Conception and also as Mother’s Day. The United States decided to move its tradition to May, choosing the second Sunday of the month.

The activist Julia Ward Home was one of the promoters of this day after a demonstration in Boston at the end of the 19th century. She brought together all the mothers of families who were victims of the Civil War. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson announced Mother’s Day as an official celebration on the second Sunday in May, the date on which the mother of another of its promoters, Anna Reeves Jarvis, died, and whom he honored every second Sunday in May.

Mother’s Day is celebrated on different days in different countries

A lot of countries do not celebrate Mother’s Day on the same day. However, it’s mostly during May. In some countries, the date for Mother’s Day is chosen based on other festivals as well. That it is celebrated on the first Sunday in May also has its explanation, and that is that May is the month that was related to the feminine divinities in the classical world, and the month dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the Christian religion. In addition, it is also the month of maximum splendor of spring and when flowering breaks out in the countryside, which is why flowers are usually given as gifts on this holiday.

Germany

In Germany, Mother’s Day takes place on the second Sunday of May each year. It began in 1922 and 1923 as a commercial and non-political celebration at the initiative of German florists, who encouraged honoring mothers by giving them flowers. During National Socialism this celebration was related to mothers and motherhood and was strongly linked to the idea of ​​the Germanic race, showing women with a large number of children as heroines of the people, since they helped spread the Aryan race.

Brazil

The first commemoration dates back to May 12, 1918, in Porto Alegre, and was organized by Associação Cristã de Moços. 17​ In 1932, the then president Getúlio Vargas, at the request of the Brazilian Federation of Feminist Women for Progress, set the date of celebration as the second Sunday of May throughout the country. The initiative was part of the strategy of feminists who sought to value the importance of women in society, encouraged by the perspectives that opened up after winning the right to vote in February of the same year.

Argentina

In Argentina, it is commemorated on the third Sunday of October, about the commemoration of the motherhood of Saint Mary.

Bolivia

In Bolivia, it is celebrated on May 27, in commemoration of the Heroines of the Crown who faced the royalist army during the Bolivian War of Independence in 1812 on the hill of San Sebastián, in the city of Cochabamba. who sacrificed their lives to fight the Spanish royalist troops.

Italy

In Italy, its birth dates back to the 1950s for commercial and religious reasons. In 1956, the senator and mayor of Bordighera Raúl Zaccari together with the president of the Bordighera-Vallecrosia Flower and Ornamental Plant Fair Giacomo Pallanca decided to celebrate Mother’s Day in Bordighera on the second Sunday of May 1956 at the Zeni Theater; Subsequently, the party took place successively at the Palazzo del Parco. On the other hand, the following year the parish priest of Tordibetto di Assisi Otello Migliosi devised a celebration on May 12, 1957, not to celebrate mothers in their social and biological quality, but in their great religious, Christian, and interreligious value, and as a land of encounter and dialogue between its different cultures.

Spain

Mother’s Day in Spain has been celebrated on the first Sunday in May since 1965, although it has never been officially declared and has a mainly commercial and popular character. In 1925, the Valencian postal official and poet Julio Menendez Garcia published a Hymn to the Mother in a pamphlet in which he proposed the celebration of Mother’s Day in all Spanish-speaking countries. The official declaration was never produced, but at that time the initiative was adopted at the local level on different dates; Thus, for example, in Madrid, Mother’s Day was celebrated on October 4, 1926.

Here are some cool Mother’s Day quotes by famous people

• When you are looking at your mother, you are looking at the purest love you will ever know.” —Charley Benetto
• “Mother is the heartbeat in the home; and without her, there seems to be no heartthrob.” —Leroy Brownlow
• “Mothers are like glue. Even when you can’t see them, they’re still holding the family together.” —Susan Gale
• “My Mother: She is beautiful, softened at the edges, and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her. ” —Jodi Picoult
• “Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.” —William Makepeace Thackeray
• “The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.” —James E. Faust
• “It may be possible to gild pure gold, but who can make his mother more beautiful?” —Mahatma Gandhi
• “There is no role in life that is more essential than that of motherhood.” —Elder M. Russell Ballard
• “Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.” —Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “Only mothers can think of the future because they give birth to it in their children.” —Maxim Grosky
• “My mother was my role model before I even knew what that word was.” —Lisa Leslie
• “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.” —Maya Angelou
• “Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary – it’s an act of infinite optimism.” —Gilda Radner

Wherever and whenever you are reading this, whether it’s Mother’s Day or not, please speak to your mother right now.