Make mama happy

PETER BUFFA

Know what day it is? I hope so. Tell me you didn’t forget.

They have a lot of wise sayings down South, but none wiser than

this: When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

William Ross Wallace, a 19th century poet from Kentucky, cleaned

up the grammar, but ended up in the same place: “The hand that rocks

the cradle is the hand that rules the world.”

Yes, it is the Day of the Mother, and I have been asked to present

you once again with the “Peter F. Buffa Complete and Somewhat

Accurate History of Mothers, Motherhood and the Day That Honors

Both.” I’m working on a shorter title. Lighten up.

Mother’s Day mirth is not new. It dates back to ancient Greece,

the earliest being a yearly tribute to Rhea, who was the mother of

all the gods, and boy was she tired.

The Roman festival of Hilaria, which must have been very funny,

dates back to 250 BC in honor of the goddess Magna Mater, who was

Alma Mater’s cousin. Not really. I made that up.

To honor Magna Mater, which means Great Mother in Latin, a temple

was built on Rome’s Palatine Hill where people would bring gifts for

Maggie on the big day.

In the 1600s, a holiday called Mothering Sunday popped up in

England, which is where the queen lives. Mothering Sunday was

celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent to honor the mummys of

England, who are like the mummies of Egypt, only totally different.

In this country, it all started with Anna M. Jarvis, who was born

in 1864 and died in 1948, the year I was born.

The idea that someone who was born during the Civil War was still

alive when I was born is neither lost on me nor amusing.

At any rate, Annie had a hard knock life. Some of you got that,

some of you didn’t. The daughter of a strict Methodist minister, she

graduated from the Female Seminary in Wheeling, W.V., and taught

Sunday school in the Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton for 20

years.

It is safe to assume that Annie was not a party girl. She never

married and was extremely attached to her mother, Anna Reese Jarvis,

who worked tirelessly for mothers who had lost their sons in the

Civil War.

Just after the war, she tried to establish Mother’s Work Day to

honor all that mothers do in caring for their children. The crowd did

not go wild.

Fifteen years later, Julia Ward Howe, best known for her lyrics in

the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” proposed an annual holiday called

Mother’s Day, but she couldn’t get a single “hallelujah.”

When Anna Reese Jarvis died in May 1905, her daughter Anna took up

the cause. With her father already gone, Anna was left alone to care

for her blind sister, Elsinore. This is totally depressing, and I

didn’t even know the woman, other than the fact that she died in

1948, which I am still bitter about.

The first Mother’s Day was a memorial service and commemoration of

mothers everywhere, organized by Anna, at which she gave everyone a

white carnation as a symbol of the goodness of mothers.

In 1907, Anna started a national letter-writing campaign to set

aside one Sunday in May as Mother’s Day and to make it a national

holiday. Anna wrote and wrote, and when she was done, she wrote some

more.

In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson actually did something, which

surprised everyone, when he signed a bill making the second Sunday in

May “Mother’s Day -- And Don’t You Forget It” forever more.

But as the years passed, Anna Jarvis’ crusade took a strange turn

as she became more and more upset about the commercialization of

Mother’s Day. She got some more paper, refilled her pen, and sent a

blizzard of letters to clergymen, politicians, editors and anyone

else she could think of across the country.

She was especially upset with florists, of all people.

“What will you do to route the charlatans, bandits, pirates,

racketeers, kidnappers and other termites,” she wrote, “that would

undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest

movements and celebrations?”

Annie, two things, if I may: No more caffeine, and how did

termites get involved in this?

In the 1930s, when the U.S. Postal Service announced a Mother’s

Day stamp featuring Whistler’s Mother and a vase of white carnations,

Anna went postal.

Calling it a Mother’s Day stamp was bad enough, but using her

white carnations was just too much. She campaigned day in and day out

against the stamp and actually convinced President Roosevelt to

remove the words “Mother’s Day” from it, although he wouldn’t budge

on the white carnations.

When Eleanor Roosevelt joined a group called American War Mothers,

which raised money by selling white carnations for Mother’s Day, Anna

Jarvis started going through three reams of paper a day. She even

crashed a meeting of the American War Mothers, shouting about the

desecration of Mother’s Day, and had to be forcefully removed by the

police.

Even though they sparred for years, florists never forgot their

debt to Anna Jarvis for creating Mother’s Day. She spent the last

months of her life alone and penniless in a nursing home, but a

floral-industry trade group paid her medical and living expenses in

full, totally unknown to her.

So there you have it.

One more quote, this one from poet William Goldsmith Brown: “The

sweetest sounds to mortals given are heard in mother, home, and

heaven.”

If you’re lucky enough to still have your mom, seize the day. Do

it up as big as you can. Just don’t sing that song about “M is for

the many things she gave me.” It’s too sappy, even for Mother’s Day.

I gotta go.