Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers. We had a wonderful Mother’s Day gathering at our house in Rapid City this year. Several mothers were present and accounted for, my wife, my mom, and my two sister-in-laws spent the day being showered with praise and adornment from children and husbands. It was an especially special Mother’s Day for my sister-in-law, Marki, as it was her first.

Mother’s Day is celebrated in most countries in some form or another on various days of the year but got its start in the United States. Here in the United States the second Sunday in May was designated as Mother’s Day in 1914 after a five or six year effort led by a Ms. Anna Jarvis. It seems that Anna’s delight in her successful effort to get this special day in the books was short lived.

Nine years after Mother’s Day became officially recognized Anna became fed up with its commercialization and proceeded to spend a lot of time (the rest of her life to be exact) and money (all of it to be exact) fighting what she saw as the “abuse” of the celebration. You would not have bumped into her in the greeting card isle of the supermarket as she criticized those that rely on the sappy prose of Hallmark as being lazy oafs lacking the fortitude to write a personal note of adoring gratitude to their mothers.

The fortitude and determination Anna Jarvis utilized to push for and gain the acceptance and recognition of Mother’s Day was redirected into stopping what she had started. She was arrested for disturbing the peace during a Mother’s Day celebration in 1948 and said she regretted ever starting Mother’s Day. If the flowers and cards of that era were upsetting to her can you imagine the disdain and angst she would harbor nowadays when the Sunday paper landed on her step chocked full of sale ads advertising everything a mother never knew she wanted or needed.

Poor Anna had no idea she was laying the tracks for yet another opportunity for the train of commercialization to roll in and tell people that their mothers would like nothing more than a weed whacker, all-season radial tires, a salad shooter, a dozen tulips, and new golf cleats? She got that train rolling and it’s not going to stop as long as there are people making money off of it.

Not so surprising is the fact that Anna never married and never had any children. It would have been a tough gig being the child of the women who made it her life’s mission to completely obliterate Mother’s Day and having to endure heated speeches regarding the evils of macaroni necklaces, boxes of chocolate, and the greeting card industry.

I’m generally not a slave to the material world revolving around all of these special days and feel that simple and sincere always trumps extravagance and excess. So although Anna may have been a bit overzealous in her attempts to put an end to the monster she created I have to say that I’m not in disagreement with her disdain for the commercialization carnival that roles in with each Mother’s Day.

There is no one right way to celebrate and honor your wife and mother on Mother’s day. How you do it isn’t as important as that you do it. We all had a great time and I think our Mother’s Day celebration was a success. Either that or the lady’s were just too polite to tell us otherwise. Anyhow…Happy Mother’s Day.