Alert! Mother’s Day is this Sunday! That means that flowers, chocolate and greeting cards will be selling off the shelves this weekend. Get there early.

You might know that Mother’s Day was started by Anna Jarvis, who in 1908 handed out white carnations at her church in Grafton, New Jersey on the second Sunday in May. Why that day? It was the Sunday closest to the death of her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis. She wanted to honor her dearly departed mom and white carnations were her mother’s favorite flower. You see, Ann Reeves Jarvis had been instrumental in forming a club for mothers to combat the spread of diseases that killed so many children. Mrs. Jarvis had lost nine of her 13 children while they were young and she wanted to do something to stop childhood mortality. She taught mothers about sanitation and how to properly cook food and boil water to kill bacteria. These women provided medical kits for families of sick children. She called her groups the Mothers’ Day Work Clubs. It was her desire to honor these mothers with a special day. On her deathbed, her daughter, Anna, took up the cause. So, in 1908, she brought hundreds of carnations with her to church to honor her own mother and all the mothers who were present that day.

Anna Jarvis’ idea was widely reported. Mother’s Day caught on quickly after the first celebration. Before long, the tradition had spread to other areas of the country. Six years after the first Mother’s Day, it became an official national holiday by proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson. Soon florists and greeting card companies were seeing high demand for their products. With a little marketing, sales were booming.

That’s where Anna Jarvis took issue with the day. She claimed all she ever wanted to do in creating Mother’s Day was to give everyone a day to honor their own mother in a special way, not to create a profit center for commercial purposes. She even went as far as to petition Congress to have the federal holiday rescinded. She claimed that she owned the copyright to the phrase, "Mother’s Day” and crafty advertisers got around her complaint by advertising "Mothers’ Day” – a plural possessive instead of a singular possessive. Anna Jarvis drove herself insane trying to stop what she had started.

Despite Anna’s efforts, Mother’s Day continues to be a huge day for the floral industry, accounting for 24 percent of annual sales. It the second largest date for floral sales. Many more flowers are sold on Mother’s Day than Valentine’s Day. (Although Christmas outsells them all.) Here is the marketing lesson that Anna started and could not stop. Emotion sells. There is no deeper emotion for most people than the love they feel for their mother. So whatever the cost, they will buy flowers or anything else that brings their mother joy. Once the floodgates of emotion are opened, it is hard to close them up again… nearly impossible, as Anna Jarvis found out.

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Anna Jarvis: The woman who regretted creating Mother's Day, by Vibeke Vinema, BBC Stories, May 10 , 2020