Celebrations of Mothers and Motherhood

People in many ancient cultures celebrated holidays honoring motherhood, personified as a goddess. Here are just a few of those:

• Ancient Greeks celebrated a holiday in honor of Rhea, the mother of the gods.
• Ancient Romans celebrated a holiday in honor of Cybele, a mother goddess, March 22-25 – the celebrations were notorious enough that followers of Cybele were banished from Rome.
• In the British Isles and Celtic Europe, the goddess Brigid, and later her successor St. Brigid, were honored with a spring Mother’s Day, connected with the first milk of the ewes.

 Mothering Sunday was celebrated in Britain beginning in the 17th century

• It was honored on the fourth Sunday in Lent.
• It began as a day when apprentices and servants could return home for the day to visit their mothers.
• They often brought a gift with them, often a “mothering cake” — a kind of fruitcake or fruit-filled pastry known as simnels.
• Furmety, a sweetened boiled cereal dish, was often served at the family dinner during Mothering Sunday celebrations.
• By the 19th century, the holiday had almost completely died out.
• Mother’s Day in Britain—or Mothering Sunday—came to be celebrated again after World War II, when American servicemen brought the custom and commercial enterprises used it as an occasion for sales, etc.

• In the United States, there are about 82.5 million mothers. (source: US Census Bureau)

• About 96% of American consumers take part in some way in Mother’s Day (source: Hallmark)

• Mother’s Day is widely reported as the peak day of the year for long distance telephone calls.

• There are more than 23,000 florists in the United States with a total of more than 125,000 employees. Colombia is the leading foreign supplier of cut flowers and fresh flower buds to the US. California produces two-thirds of domestic production of cut flowers. (source: US Census Bureau)

• Mother’s Day is the busiest day of the year for many restaurants.

• Retailers report that Mother’s Day is the second highest gift-giving holiday in the United States (Christmas is the highest).

• Most popular month for having babies in the U.S. is August, and the most popular weekday is Tuesday. (source: US Census Bureau)

• About twice as many young women were childfree in the year 2000 as in the 1950s (source: Ralph Fevre, The Guardian, Manchester, March 26, 2001)

• In the US, 82% of women ages 40-44 are mothers. This compares to 90% in 1976. (source: US Census Bureau)

• In Utah and Alaska, women on the average will have three children before the end of their childbearing years. Overall, the average in the United States is two. (source: US Census Bureau)

• In 2002, 55% of American women with infant children were in the workforce, compared to 31% in 1976, and down from 59% in 1998. In 2002, there were 5.4 million stay-at-home mothers in the US. (source: US Census Bureau)

This article By Jone Johnson Lewis is brought to you by:

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