Mother's Day
celebration honoring mothers
Mother's Day is a celebration honoring the mother of the family or individual, as well as motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society. It is celebrated on different days in many parts of the world, most commonly in March or May. It complements similar celebrations honoring family members, such as Father's Day, Siblings Day, and Grandparents' Day.
Countries around the world have a multi-century history of a day to celebrate mothers.
In the United States, the modern version of the holiday began in the early 20th century at the initiative of Anna Jarvis. She organized the first Mother's Day service of worship and celebration at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, which serves as the International Mother's Day Shrine today. It is not directly related to the many traditional celebrations of mothers and motherhood that have existed throughout the world over thousands of years, such as the Greek worshippers of Cybele, the mother deity Rhea, the Roman festival of Hilaria, or the other Christian ecclesiastical Mothering Sunday celebration (associated with the image of Mother Church). However, in some countries, Mother's Day is still synonymous with these older traditions.
The American version of Mother's Day has been criticized for having become too commercialized. Jarvis herself, who began the celebration as a liturgical observance, regretted this commercialism and expressed that this was never her intention.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q47502. The Library of Congress control number is sh85087540. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mother's Day” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.