Ken’s e-Pistle

May 10, 2023

In case you missed it, this Sunday is Mother’s Day.  This annual holiday actually originated in Ancient Greece and Rome where celebrations were held in honor of the mother goddesses, Rhea and Cybele. Later, around the 16th Century, the holiday of Mothering Sunday was recognized during the Fourth Sunday of Lent by Church of England and Roman Catholic parishes.

In the United States, the movement to honor mothers began in the flames of the Civil War and afterward as Ann Reeves Jarvis sought to bring together the socially divided classes of the time and, afterward, to seek reconciliation between the mothers of the Union and the Confederacy.

In 1914, Mother’s Day became an official holiday when President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that it should be celebrated annually on the second Sunday of May.

I remember celebrating Mother’s Day as a child.  We would scrub up and go to church dressed in our best clothes and sporting a rose from Grandmother’s garden.  The tradition stated that you would wear a red rose if your mother was alive and a white one if she was deceased.  Alas, Grandmother could only grow pink roses.  She told us to tell folk at church that our mother was half-dead.

We laugh to keep from crying, right mothers?

I bid you peace!