Mother’s Day, because we celebrate it today

Until a few years ago it was always May 8, but now it is the second Sunday in May when all mothers are celebrated. The Catholic world chooses the Marian month of May to celebrate, but this is not the case for everyone. There Mother’s Day was born in the USA, the Italian one comes from Bordighera in the fifties.

ORIGIN OF THE FESTIVAL
The founder of Mother’s Day in the US is considered Anna Jarvis: the memorial made for his mother in 1908 became an official holiday in 1914.

There is also an organization aimed at preserving Mother’s Day because the founder herself had to say over the years with the commercial turn taken by the party. It was supposed to be an occasion to be with the family and not to give gifts and buy flowers.

ITALY
The first celebration in Italy was in the 1950s in Bordighera. In 1956 on the initiative of the then mayor Raul Zaccari. A few years earlier, however, Don Otello Migliosi celebrated his mother in Tordibetto di Assisi, also as a religious figure and intermediary between peoples and cultures. Since 1957 the feast has been established first on May 8 and then on the second Sunday of the month. The choice fell on an always festive day. The fascist regime had already established the National Day of the Mother and Child. It was celebrated on December 24th starting in 1933 and the women who had more children were rewarded.

MAY
In Italy it is in May, the month that the Catholic Church dedicates to Madonna, as in the United States and many other countries. In Norway it is the second Sunday of February, March 8 in most of Eastern Europe, March 15 in San Marino, in Panama it is celebrated on December 8, the day of the Immaculate Conception, it is the first day of spring, March 21, in many Arab countries.

MOTHERING SUNDAY
in Great Britain and Ireland it is the fourth Sunday of Lent, Mother’s Sunday. Between 1600 and 1700 it was the Sunday when children who were away from their families because they were studying or were serving in other homes could return to their mothers. It was customary to bring her a gift.

ENCYCLOPEDIA
How does mom define the encyclopedia? Treccani says for mother: woman who conceived and gave birth. The concept assumes an eminently cultural and social character, distinct from that of parent, in cases of non-parent mother (for example in adoption) in which the function of caring for the offspring is paramount. Mamma is a familiar use of mother, but it also has a different origin for dictionaries, from the term breast.

COMMON SAYING
There are dozens of idioms with the words mother and mother: Mother earth, mother yeast, Mother nature, hard mother, mother’s coconut, mother’s beautiful, as mother did it, mother Rai, mother them Turks! which recalls the atavistic terror of the invasion of the Turkish population in the West.