In America, Mother’s Day is pretty predictable – it falls on the second Sunday in May. The same is true in Australia.
Of course, that means the specific date changes by a few days every year in both countries.
But the UK’s Mothering Sunday varies far more. Some years, it falls in March, and other years it happens in April.
This year, Mothering Sunday falls on 30 March (on the cusp of the two months). In 2024, it landed a whole 20 days earlier (10 March).
But why is there such a difference?
The UK and US versions of Mother’s Day have different origins
The UK’s version of Mother’s Day actually has its roots in the Church calendar and fits into Lent.
The BBC explains that the tradition dates back to the Middle Ages, when children who may have left their homes to work were allowed to return to their families and “mother” church for one Sunday.
This happened four Sundays into Lent. Lent starts 40 days (plus Sundays, which don’t count as days of penance) before Easter.
Easter falls on “the first Sunday after the full Moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox,” Royal Museums Greenwich says.
If the first full moon falls on a Sunday, then Easter will be the Sunday following that.
So, all of that explains why the date shifts around so often. This is also why the UK version is officially Mothering Sunday and not Mother’s Day.
Mother’s Day is actually the US version of the celebration.
So… how did Mother’s Day start in America?
It was created by Anna Jervis ― one of 13 children, only four of whom reached adulthood.
Her mum, Anne Reeves Jarvis, organised groups which taught mothers how to increase their children’s likelihood of survival through practices like boiling water.
“I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a memorial mothers’ day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it,” Anne Reeves Jervis once said.
So, two years after she died in 1905, her daughter Anna Jervis decided to hold a memorial in the West Virginia church her mother had belonged to.
This would help to realise her mother’s vision, she thought, saying the day would be “For the Best Mother who Ever Lived — Your Mother”.
She encouraged people to wear a white carnation to show appreciation for their mother. By 1914, President Woodrow Wilson had declared Mother’s Day a national holiday because it had grown so popular.
But Anna didn’t like how commercialised it had become, writing disparagingly of “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations”.
She spent the rest of her life trying to reclaim the copyright to sue people she saw as profiting unfairly off the day.
