![\"momsday\"](\"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/momsday.jpg\")
Me and BarbaraB. I was about 2 1\/2 here.<\/p><\/div>\n
Believe it or not, Mother’s Day wasn’t created by Hallmark. It wasn’t even created by a mother<\/a>. A child-free woman named Anna Jarvis organized the first Mother’s Day services with her own mother in mind in 1908.\u00a0 Activist Julia Ward Howe had proposed a similar idea 36 years earlier<\/a>, but it was Jarvis whose lobbying efforts got President Woodrow Wilson to issue — on May 9, 1914 — a presidential proclamation<\/a> that established Mother’s Day as the second Sunday of May.<\/p>\n The holiday quickly became commercialized, to Jarvis’s dismay. In the 1920s<\/a>, she wrote, “To have Mother\u2019s Day the burdensome, wasteful, expensive gift day that Christmas and other special days have become, is not our pleasure.”<\/p>\n She actually went broke fighting the holiday she fought to establish.\u00a0 She also fought the notion of a more-inclusive Parents’ Day. As Smithsonian Magazine notes<\/a>, Jarvis felt there were plenty of U.S. holidays honoring men as fathers of their country. “When a son or daughter cannot endure the name \u2018mother\u2019 for a single day of the year it would seem there is something wrong,\u201d Jarvis argued. \u201cOne day out of all the ages, and one day out of all the year to bear the name \u2018mother\u2019 is surely not too much for her.\u201d<\/p>\n Personally, I enjoy getting cards, flowers and jewelry, so if anyone wants to give me those for being mommy to four adult stepchildren and three animals, I’m not going to turn you away out of principle. Just sayin’.<\/p>\n Today also marks the 50th birthday of the mother of all runway supermodels: My all-time favorite<\/a>, Linda Evangelista. I was thrilled to see her posing fiercely on at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum on Monday.<\/p>\n