hello,my dear all,i wonder who knows the origin of mothers'day and valentine's day.i know that mothers' day first begins because people want the peace of world,what about the details?
thank you!
If you think Mother's Day is too commercialized, you're not alone. The woman called "the mother of Mother's Day," Anna Jarvis — the person who did the most to make Mother's Day a national holiday — thought so, too. She considered the printed greeting card "a poor excuse for the letter you are too lazy to write" and in fact ended up spending her inheritance campaigning against the holiday she had helped to popularize.
But that was later. Her personal PR campaign for Mother's Day kicked off in May 1907 in Grafton, West Virginia (called the birthplace of Mother's Day), when she held a memorial for her mother in her church. The service took the form of an appreciation of her mother and those of all the attendees. The idea went statewide two years later and nationwide in 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson established Mother's Day as a national holiday.
One could say it was in Anna Jarvis's blood. Her mother, also called Anna Jarvis, was an early proponent of Mother's Day activities. At that time, after the Civil War, the day was less about showing appreciation for the woman at home and more about promoting pacifism and social activism.
If the two Mrs. Jarvises were the adoptive mothers and caregivers of Mother's Day, its birth mother was Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist, feminist and poet who was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1870, she issued her Mother's Day Proclamation, which begins:
Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!......
The origins of Valentine's Day, like the origins of love itself, are somewhat obscure — a combination of myth, history, destiny, chance and marketing.
Legend has it that a certain third-century priest named Valentine persisted in performing marriage ceremonies despite a ban by the Roman emperor Claudius II (Claudius was persuaded that single men made better soldiers for his army). Thrown into jail, Valentine formed a relationship with his jailor's daughter (some say he cured her blindness) and he signed his last message to her "From your Valentine," a phrase which still gets a lot of mileage.
St. Valentine was executed on February 14, circa the year 270, and his remains (probably his, but there were two other Christian martyrs called Valentine) are now on display in the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin.
There are also reports of an ancient pagan custom that took place in preparation for the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which started February 15. The names of the town's maidens would be collected and then drawn at random by the local bachelors; in this fashion couples were paired off for the year......
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