Honoring Mother’s Day on Sunday

Sunday is the day when children pamper their mothers. They make breakfast, give flowers, cards and gifts, and behave all day long. The second Sunday in May is Mother’s Day in almost every country in the world.

The history of Mother’s Day dates back to 1907, when Anne Jarvis from Philadelphia, exactly one year after her mother died, had the idea to choose a day to thank mothers all over the world for all their love and unselfish care. The idea became real one year later. The first city to honor Mother’s Day was Philadelphia on May 10, 1908.

Six years later, President Woodrow Wilson officially proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

In the following years, Mother’s Day became popular in India, China, Mexico, Scandinavia, England and Switzerland. The first Mother’s Day in Germany was celebrated in 1933. In the initial years in Germany, mothers were not honored for their devoted work but rewarded for the many children they had. In 1938, Adolf Hitler awarded mothers with the “mother’s cross” to honor their outstanding help against low birth rates and death. Each year in August, on the birthday of Hitler’s mother, he gave the bronze medal to mothers with four children, the silver medal to mothers with six and the gold medal to mothers with eight children.

After the war, it took a while until Germans started celebrating Mother’s Day again. People still had terrible memories of the past, as well as the current miserable situation on their minds; they didn’t feel like calling special attention to something that should be normal and taken for granted.