Mother’s Day

On March 30th we will be marking one of the best observed festival days in the UK, Mother’s Day. Every year, many people will insist that it should be called Mothering Sunday really. What’s in the name? What’s in the name is a bit of history and this is the story as I know it …

Going back some time to a world where most of us were employed either on farms or as servants, holidays were scarce. Means of transportation were also scarce and, for a typical person with an afternoon or morning off each week, visiting was limited to how far you could get on foot while also allowing time to get back to your employers. If your family was more than a few hours walk away, you would very rarely see them.

However, there was one festival in the year where the church encouraged people to worship together in the oldest church in an area, usually called the Mother Church. When people travelled from the newer parishes over to the ancient one, it usually meant that rare family reunions would take place. In its oldest sense then, what came to be called ‘Mothering Sunday’ was about visiting a Mother Church with the wonderful side-effect of reuniting families.

Moving forward in history now to the Second World War, we had a lot of homesick, young GIs stationed in English homes. In the USA a celebration of motherhood called Mother’s Day had already been in existence for several decades. Over there it is in May. These young US soldiers, missing home, began to honour their host ‘mothers’ with gifts in the way they were used to doing. This went down very well and unsurprisingly after the GIs went home, the custom of gift-giving to mothers continued. The link was soon made between this new custom and the older one, and Mother’s Day became the main theme of Mothering Sunday.

Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday, whichever name we use, also needs to be kept with sensitivity. If you don’t have a mother to give presents to, or if you are a mother who has lost a child, or for many other reasons, this day may need handling with care. Whether or not you pray, it’s good to keep a little time, in the middle of the celebration, to remember those for whom Mother’s Day has a shadow over it.

David Knight
Vicar of Fletching, Piltdown and Sheffield Park