Duggie’s Ramblings March 24
Mothering Sunday was on Sunday March 10. Yes Mothering Sunday not Mother’s Day, for Mother’s Day is on May 12th and celebrated in every state of the United States by law since 1914 when the President of the United States,Woodrow Wilson made it legally binding.
It is a secular day which is ironic as Woodrow Wilson was a son of a clergyman and a practising Christian. It began on the initiative of Anna Jarvis from Philadelphia who created Mothers Day in 1904 to foster friendship and good health among women and held a Christian service in her local church in Philadelphia partly to celebrate the life of her late mother whose home was West Virginia.
Later in life she regretted creating Mothers Day as it launched a ‘commercial juggernaut’ which has spread among other countries including the United Kingdom.
Why does the United Kingdom celebrate this day (always a Sunday) on the 4th Sunday of Lent? Though it is a Sunday the ‘commercial juggernaut’ has dropped the Christian content and reverted to Mother’s Day.
It is now difficult to find a card with Mothering Sunday and most restaurants and shops advertise it as a secular day- good for business-one day in the year for mothers- as a token of thankfulness.
Mothering expresses a continuing lifetime’s care and responsibility, waking up at 3am in the morning to a crying baby, greeting a sulky teenager home from school, worrying when they leave home to enter the world wide adult life with all its snags and pitfalls.
Yet, memory is selective, in childhood we spent our summer holiday at Broadstairs on the Kent coast. Behind the beach was a very large home, and each day the children came to the beach from this home, the children were all orphans, probably as a result of the chaos of wartime., no mothers but they were mothered.
Sadly, other factors contribute to similar circumstances in the present times. Many women are unable to have children-perhaps we should also think and give time to them -and the infants abandoned by their parents and cared for by others.
I am reading a book recommended to me, called This Blessed Plot. It is written by a journalist who travelled widely around the world, Hazel Southam.
She lives in or near Winchester in Hampshire and has written this book-very entertaining- about her innocent venture into an allotment designed so she could grow and eat seasonally! In her book she uses a phrase new to the reader-Nut Graf– not once but several times. It does not relate specifically to gardening, she used it in journalism. It has left me a little puzzled.
Editor ( A Nut graf or nut graph, is a paragraph that explains the context of a story “in a nutshell”.)
Kibworth Golf Club – March 2024
