The woman who created Mother’s Day wanted us to thank our moms — not spend a bunch of money

When Anna Jarvis founded the “Mother’s Day” holiday to honor her own mother — who dedicated her life to helping women and children — she thought she was instituting a day to honor the sacrifices and care that mothers everywhere give to their children.

How Mother’s Day has come to be celebrated, however, isn’t really what she had in mind.

Anna Jarvis’ mom, Ann Jarvis, formed several Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in the 1850s, according to West Virginia State Archives, to unite Union and Confederate mothers in efforts to provide education, improve sanitary working conditions for women and to bring awareness to infant mortality rates.

Anna Jarvis respected her mother’s work and all she had accomplished. When her mother died in 1905, it was that affection that prompted Anna Jarvis to seek to continue that work and fight to make Mother’s Day an official holiday.

She held the first formal Mother’s Day celebration in 1908 in her hometown in West Virginia. In 1910, when the governor of West Virginia officially made Mother’s Day a state holiday — and again in 1914 when President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday — Anna Jarvis encouraged people to send two specific items as gifts.

First, she thought people should send handwritten letters to their mothers expressing their gratitude. Second, she wanted people to give mothers white carnation flowers, which were to become the official emblem of the holiday.

As years passed, Anna Jarvis started noticing how florists, greeting card manufacturers and other industries had started capitalizing on the holiday by charging more money for certain items. She was disturbed because the holiday was turning into a moneymaking venture, instead of as a day celebrating love and appreciation.

Anna Jarvis filed lawsuits against the industries, arranged boycotts against florists, threatened to sue the New York Mother’s Day Committee and even accused the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, of using Mother’s Day as a means of fundraising materials for charities.

The holiday had become something other than what Anna Jarvis intended. She wanted Mother’s Day to be a private and heartfelt acknowledgment of what mothers mean to their families and to be a day of sentiment, not profit.

Jarvis even called florists and greeting card manufacturers “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers, and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest, and truest movements and celebrations” in a news release.

Jarvis spent the rest of her life combating the holiday’s commercial and political exploitation.

How could you celebrate Mother’s Day this year in a way that honors the holiday’s founding mother?

Charlotte Lokinu is a junior at Jefferson High School in Cedar Rapids and a staff writer for the Jefferson Outlook newspaper.