What’s in a name?

From Mothering Sunday to Mother’s Day

The shift from what was once known as Mothering Sunday to Mother’s Day in the UK is, at one level, another example of how capitalist markets have recast what once were religious festivals as secular celebrations, marked by the mass consumption of goods and services. In that regard, Mother’s Day is another version of Christmas and Halloween.

Just as with Christmas and Halloween, there are anchor commodities that mark Mother’s Day; in this instance, cards and cut flowers. How those particular commodities came to be anchor commodities also has parallels with Christmas and Halloween. This is to do with cultural contact zones. But in this instance the contact zones weren’t ones forged through European colonisation and settlement. Rather, they are much more recent – an effect of the presence of very large numbers of American service personnel stationed and living in the UK during WW2.

The importance of this presence to the expansion in mass marketized consumption in the UK is hard to overstate. Typically, this is a story told through Coca Cola, ‘nylons’ (or stockings) and American tobacco products – cigarettes. But it’s also what lies behind the transformation in Mother’s Day.

Tied to mid-Lent, what was then known as Mothering Sunday in the UK originally had very little to do with mothers. Historical research shows that by the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries it was identified as a holiday for the very large numbers of people then apprenticed and employed in domestic service. The holiday was marked by a return to the ‘mother church’ – or the place of baptism. Typically, that place was also where relatives, most especially parents, lived. And, as ever, when people return in this way they either bear gifts to accompany their ‘homecoming’ – and/or, those being visited mark the occasion with special food. The homecoming gift associated with Mothering Sunday was a simnel cake – a tradition which historians have dated to 17^th century Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.

Simnel cakes are another version of Christmas cake – minus the royal icing. At a general level, they demonstrate the basic principle that festivals are always marked by the consumption of out of the ordinary food. Simnel cakes are a very rich fruit cake, covered with almond paste and with 11 almond balls on the top signifying the apostles. So this was a symbolic fruit cake, with a symbolism that linked it clearly to Lent. But the value of that fruit cake was not just in its symbolism. As historians have pointed out, the simnel cake’s worth during the 16^th and 17^th centuries was also distinctly material. Highly calorific, it provided energy in abundance at a time of the year when food stocks were often low.

Come the late 19^th century and early decades of the 20^th, the cultural practices marking Mothering Sunday in the UK had already begun to change. Simnel cakes had become consumer goods – commercially produced products that many people bought rather than made themselves. There had also been a subtle shift in what was going on in churches on Mothering Sunday. Local newspapers from the 1920s and 1930s testify to the practice of young children giving tiny bouquets of violets (supplied by the church) to their own mothers. That practice is a transatlantic one. Its origins lie in the motivations that lay behind the emergence of Mother’s Day in the US.

The history of Mother’s Day in the US traces to one woman, Anna Jarvis, who in 1908 instigated a church-based memorial service in Philadelphia to honour the community and charitable-based work of her own mother. Anna Jarvis then campaigned to widen that celebration, in acknowledgement of the then widespread role of women, and particularly mothers, in what we now term social and community-based economies. So successful was this campaign that in1914 the day was formalised across the entire US. Henceforth, Mother’s Day was to be celebrated on the second Sunday in May.

At the same time as Mother’s Day was becoming established as an all-American holiday, so the advertising industry was in the early stages of its development. In his book, Strange Bright Blooms: a history of cut flowers, Randy Malamud highlights the significance of the 1918 Mother’s Day campaign: ‘Say it with Flowers’. That advert was the moment when Mother’s Day in the US became indelibly associated with cut flowers – and, in so doing, it supercharged their consumption. To this day, in the US Mother’s Day is referred to as the Super Bowl of the florist industry, whilst ‘Say it with Flowers’ has become the strapline for all sellers of cut flowers, be they supermarkets or independent florists. Not missing a trick, the then emergent greetings card industry also got in on the act, producing Mother’s Day cards. What had begun as a means to acknowledge unpaid community work with care at its core had morphed in only a few years to become a capitalist market marked by increasingly normative purchasing, of commercially produced greetings cards and cut flowers.

It's fair to say that there was some opposition in the US to the rapid commercialisation of Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis herself was allegedly appalled by its commercial crassness and is quoted as wishing she’d never set things in motion. Others regret the decision that was taken to make this a nationally recognised day and specifically the way that acted as a catalyst for marketing. But the genie was well and truly out of the bottle – and mothers and their families thoroughly embraced this new consumer market. So, when US military personnel crossed the Atlantic in the early 1940s, many of them didn’t think twice about translating the practice of giving Mother’s Day cards. Once that happened, emulation followed. Not to be outdone, UK citizens adopted the same practice, but transferred it from the second Sunday in May to their social and cultural point of reference, Mothering Sunday. Along the way, simnel cakes fell by the wayside, other than in a few locales where the tradition persisted. In such a way, by the 1950s what was once a religious festival in the UK had become another way mark in the annual consumption calendar.

I want to end what has been a largely historically oriented post by fast forwarding to today. Recent years have seen a growing ambivalence around the term Mother’s Day and a critique of its long exclusive association with biological motherhood. Whilst a minority abhor reducing a life of care to a named-day celebration, others want to see the social reach of the day expanded. There has been a strong push to make the day more inclusive – a means to celebrate compassion and care in all its forms, regardless of the gender of the care-giver and their status, or not, as a mother. Laudable as this is, there is a strong sense of historical irony here, for these are the very same values that Anna Jarvis was seeking to celebrate back in the early years of the 20^th century, only to fall foul of commercialisation. The same tendency seems to be being set in train today.

For sure, inclusivity matters – but it is important to recognise that it is also a means to expand markets. In 2024, the US spent over $30 bn on Mother’s Day; in the same year, Statista estimates that UK households spent £1.4bn. The Greetings Card Association reports that the UK spent £66m in 2024 on Mother’s Day cards, purchasing 29 million of them. With greater inclusivity what is already a focal point for mass over-consumption looks sure to become an even bigger bonanza for the card and cut flower industries.

If there’s a way of doing Mother’s Day differently, there are surely lessons from history, in the form of the now largely forgotten but formerly ubiquitous simnel cake. Maybe all we actually need to demonstrate care for and about care-givers is a Simnel Cake recipe repurposed for a secular age, and to set aside the time to make and bake it?