Liz Smith | 05/05/2008 8:38 am

Liz Smith Shares a Chapter from The Mother Book

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

Orgiastic excesses characterized what might be considered “the original Mother’s Day,” a Roman holiday known as the Hilaria and celebrated for three days after the Ides of March. Inaugurated in Rome in the third century B.C., the Hilaria was dedicated to a pagan goddess named Cybele, sometimes called “The Great Mother of the Gods,” sometimes as “the all-Begetter, the all-Nourisher” and sometimes merely as “Mother of Nature.” This revel bore little resemblance to our own gentle annual salute to Mom. Cybele was associated with drums, cymbals, flutes, and horns; thus her holidays were first and foremost loud. And since she was also thought to symbolize the powers of reproduction and fruitfulness in man, plants, and animals, the Roman’s Hilaria was typified more by carnality than carnations.

Closer to our sort of Mother’s Day was the English tradition known as “Mothering Sunday,” observed on the fourth Sunday of Lent in the seventeenth century. Sons and daughters who had apprenticed themselves or taken jobs as servants made a point of returning home on this day, bringing with them small gifts or a “mothering cake” for Mum. The pastry, also called simnel cake, was a rich fruit cake, remembered by Robert Herrick in the lines:

I’ll to thee a Simnell bring,
‘Gainst thou go’st a-mothering,
So that when she blesseth thee,
Half that blessing thou’lt give me.

Nowadays, of course, Mother’s Day is big, big business—a time of rejoicing for greeting card manufacturers, florists, candy makers, Ma Bell, and Western Union, not to mention stores and restaurants featuring Mother’s Day specials.

According to the Hallmark Card people, Mother’s Day ranks fourth as a card-sending occasion—behind Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Easter, but ahead of Father’s Day and Halloween. On an average first week in May, postmen slip more than 105 million cards into the mailboxes of American moms. The messages, says Hallmark editor Alan Doan, are often much longer than those of other cardtypes. “While most cards today have short sentiments, longer traditional verse is popular on Mother’s Day—sometimes as long as two dozen lines.” Concludes Doan: “People seem to want to send Mom as much love as possible.”

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“MOTHER CHURCH”

The little Andrews Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, because of its early adoption of Anna Jarvis’s concept, is now the recognized “Mother Church” of Mother’s Day. On sale at this official Mother’s Day Shrine, Inc. (its official name), are brass plaques which can be engraved with a mother’s name and birth and death dates and will be permanently displayed on a bronze tablet in the church. Prices range from fifty dollars to one thousand dollars.

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AN ABBY WARNING

Mother’s Day is a day of gladness to most mothers. But not for all. I should know. For weeks following Mother’s Day, my desk is covered with the tear-stained letters of mothers who have been snubbed, slighted or forgotten.
—Abigail Van Buren in her “Dear Abby” column

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VARIED OPINIONS

Aldous Huxley defined the Mother’s Day card as “Greetings with poems printed in imitation handwriting, so that if Mom were in her second childhood she might be duped into believing that the sentiment was not a reach-me-down, but custom-made, a lyrical outpouring from the sender’s overflowing heart.”

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No man would dare say a bad word against Mother’s Day in public, or a good word for it in private.
—Alistair Cooke

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Americans devote one day of the year to mothers, and an entire week to pickles.
—Anonymous

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