Mother’s Day
Most countries around the world commemorate their mothers on a special day. The second Sunday in May is the day set aside for Canadians to honour their mothers with the celebration of Mother’s Day.
We were curious about how this day started, so we headed over to Wikipedia and discovered that Mother’s Day as we know it was created in West Virginia in 1907, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother, Ann. The senior Jarvis had been a peace activist who cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War, and created Mother’s Day Work Clubs to address public health issues. She and another peace activist and suffragette, Julia Ward Howe, had been urging for the creation of a Mother’s Day dedicated to peace. (Sidebar: Ward Howe wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic.)
Forty years before it became an official holiday, in 1870, Ward Howe made her Mother’s Day Proclamation, which called upon mothers of all nationalities to band together to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.” Anna Jarvis wanted to honour this and to set aside a day to pay homage to all mothers, because she believed a mother is “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”
Mother’s Day remains one of the biggest days for sales of flowers, greeting cards, and the like; Mother’s Day is the biggest holiday for long-distance telephone calls, and Mother’s Day, yields the highest church attendance after Christmas Eve and Easter. Many worshippers celebrate the day with carnations, coloured if the mother is living and white if she is deceased.
During our research, we also discovered some interesting facts about pregnancy and apples. In fact, according to this article from Medical News Today, “Compelling new research has concluded that mothers who eat apples during pregnancy may protect their children from developing asthma later in life.”
And, of course, we couldn’t write about apples and Mother’s Day without investigating the phrase: “Mom and Apple Pie.” The phrase originates from WWII: when soldiers were asked what they missed the most, and why they were going to war, the stock answer became “Mom and Apple Pie.”
If you’d like to honour your mother with an apple pie this Mother’s Day, check out the recipes here. Of course, Ambrosia apples are fantastic for said pies!