This Sunday, here in the UK, is Mother's Day - it also happens to be Mothering Sunday. Two quite different things.
Mothering Sunday has been celebrated since the 16th Century on the fourth Sunday of Lent and it has nothing to do with cards, chocolates or breakfast in bed. Knowing that the celebration is over 400 years old that might not come as too much of a surprise. But it might come as a surprise to know that Mothering Sunday has nothing to do with the honouring of mums either.
Trying to communicate this to a whole primary school assembly this week I introduced the children to their great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandma. Rather than go through all those greats every time we simply called her Mary.
As a young teen (although of course, Mary didn't know that she was a teenager) Mary was sent off to work, maybe as a scullery maid, in a large house, that's about 6 miles from home. So she left home and received board and lodging as a part of her employment, and rarely returned home.
Whilst our primary school children contemplated the luxury of 175 days 'off' a year (holidays and weekends) they were thankful that they were not Mary - because Mary only got one day off a year - the fourth Sunday of Lent.
And on the fourth Sunday of Lent, Mary went 'a-mothering', she went back to her 'mother church' - the local parish church where she grew up and was baptised. And on the way back to her mother church she picked some wild flowers - maybe to decorate the church or maybe to give to her mum. And because all the other local servants also got the fourth Sunday in Lent off, and because they all travelled back to their mother church too, this would have been a joyful occasion. Families and neighbours got to catch up with the young people and the not so young people who had grown up in the village and had now travelled away to work. For many families this might be the only day in the year when they all got to be together.
Mother's Day is a much more recent creation - maybe only going back as far as great, great grandma and is a celebration honouring mothers. Interestingly enough those who were instrumental in the successful founding of Mother's Day in the early 1900s were soon organising boycotts of Mother's Day as a protest of what they saw as the commercialisation of the holiday.
Here is the UK Mothering Sunday and Mother's Day are celebrated on the same Sunday. The two celebrations have now been mixed up and most people probably think that they are the same thing.
