Living in the UK: Mother’s Day

Are you feeling a bit confused when faced with all the different Mother’s Day celebrations and advertisements in the UK during March? Isn’t it a bit too early?

It turns out that this sense of incongruity is well-founded: the dates of Mother's Day in the UK and Hong Kong are indeed different. This year, the British will celebrate Mother's Day on 19 March 2023 (Sunday), while Hong Kong's Mother's Day will be on 14 May (the second Sunday in May) - with a difference of almost two months in between. More to the point,  what was originally celebrated in the UK was not even the “Mother's Day” that Hong Kong people are familiar with!

So, what was Mother's Day originally like in Britain?

It turns out that March 19 this year is the fourth Sunday in the Christian season of Lent, which is also known as the Laetare Sunday and Mothering Sunday in Christian traditions. The “mother” here in “Mothering Sunday” refers to the "mother church", that is, the parish church where a Christian was baptised in. Back in the Middle Ages, Brits already had a custom of returning to their home cathedrals to worship on Laetare Sunday. Later, it gradually evolved into a holiday for apprentices or domestic servants who worked far away from home, and on Laetare Sunday they could return to their birthplace to visit their family and to worship at the churches they were baptised in.

So, how did Mothering Sunday evolve into Mother's Day? In 1908, Anna Jarvis held the first public Mother's Day worship in West Virginia to commemorate her mother Ann Reeves Jarvis, who died in 1905, and to thank all mothers in the world. Afterwards, with years of efforts and campaigning by Anna Jarvis, Mother's Day finally became a well-known holiday in the United States.

In response to the Mother's Day proposed by Anna Jarvis, Constance Penswick Smith launched a movement to revive Mothering Sunday in Britain in the 1920s. She encouraged Christians, on Mothering Sunday, to celebrate the different aspects of motherhood, such as the church (mother church), mothers in the family, Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, and Mother Nature. This initiative was welcomed by the Church of England, and soon the observance of Mothering Sunday spread from the United Kingdom to other Commonwealth countries.

To this day, many churches in the UK still hold special celebrations to celebrate different motherhoods on Mothering Sunday. However, as Mother’s Day gained popularity across the globe, it gradually replaced Mothering Sunday in the UK as well. Now, the way Mother’s Day is celebrated in the UK is very similar to that in Hong Kong: children will give mothers handmade cards, small gifts, flowers, or to help with housework and cooking, etc. However, Mother's Day in the UK is still celebrated on Mothering Sunday. So, this is why although the UK and Hong Kong celebrate the same festival, we celebrate it on different days!