Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (12 page)

A determined Anna Jarvis then began what has been called one of the most successful one-person letter-writing campaigns in history. She contacted
congressmen, governors, mayors, newspaper editors, ministers, and business leaders throughout the country, everyone of importance who would listen. Listen they did, responding with editorials, sermons, and political orations. Villages and towns, cities and states, began unofficial Mother’s Day observances. By 1914, to dissent on the Mother’s Day issue seemed not only cynical but un-American. Finally, the Senate approved the legislation, and on May 8, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

Although the British had long paid tribute to mothers on the fourth Sunday of the Lenten season, known as “Mothering Sunday,” it took the American observance to give the idea worldwide prominence. Within a few years after President Wilson’s proclamation, almost every country had a Mother’s Day. By every measure, though, the United States outdoes all the others. On Mother’s Day, Americans now purchase 10 million bouquets of flowers, exchange 150 million greeting cards, and dine at restaurants more than at any other time of the year. A third of all American families take Mother out to dinner on her day.

Though Anna Jarvis triumphed in her campaign for a Mother’s Day, her personal life did not have a happy ending. Disillusioned by a disastrous love affair, she vowed never to marry and, childless, came to view each Mother’s Day as a painful personal mockery. And as commercialization encroached upon what had been intended as a religious observance, she became litigious, initiating lawsuits against companies seeking to profit from Mother’s Day. The suits failed, and Anna Jarvis became a recluse. Within a short time, she exhausted her savings and lost her family home; a blind sister, Elsinore, to whom she had devoted her life, died. These misfortunes undermined her own health, and in November 1944 she was forced to seek public assistance. Realizing her desperate plight, friends provided funds so she could spend her final years in a private sanitarium. Deaf, ailing, and nearly blind, the woman whose efforts brought happiness to countless mothers died in 1948, childless and alone, at the age of eighty-four.

Father’s Day: June 19, 1910, Spokane, Washington

The idea for an official Father’s Day celebration came to a married daughter, seated in a church in Spokane, Washington, attentive to a Sunday sermon on Mother’s Day in 1910—two years after the first Mother’s Day observance in West Virginia.

The daughter was Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd. During the sermon, which extolled maternal sacrifices made for children, Mrs. Dodd realized that in her own family it had been her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, who had sacrified—raising herself and five sons alone, following the early death of his wife in childbirth. For Mrs. Dodd, the hardships her father had endured on their eastern Washington farm called to mind the unsung feats of fathers everywhere.

Her proposed local Father’s Day celebration received strong support from the town’s ministers and members of the Spokane YMCA. The date suggested for the festivities, June 5, Mrs. Dodd’s father’s birthday—a mere three weeks away—had to be moved back to the nineteenth when ministers claimed they need extra time to prepare sermons on such a new subject as Father.

Newspapers across the country, already endorsing the need for a national Mother’s Day, carried stories about the unique Spokane observance. Interest in Father’s Day increased. Among the first notables to support Mrs. Dodd’s idea nationally was the orator and political leader William Jennings Bryan, who also backed Mother’s Day. Believing that fathers must not be slighted, he wrote to Mrs. Dodd, “too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child.”

Father’s Day, however, was not so quickly accepted as Mother’s Day. Members of the all-male Congress felt that a move to proclaim the day official might be interpreted as a self-congratulatory pat on the back.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended that states, if they wished, should hold their own Father’s Day observances. He wrote to the nation’s governors that “the widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and also to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”

Many people attempted to secure official recognition for Father’s Day. One of the most notable efforts was made in 1957, by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who wrote forcefully to Congress that “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.”

Eventually, in 1972—sixty-two years after it was proposed—Father’s Day was permanently established by President Richard Nixon. Historians seeking an ancient precedent for an official Father’s Day observance have come up with only one: The Romans, every February, honored fathers—but only those deceased.

In America today, Father’s Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion, with about 85 million greeting cards exchanged.

Mother-in-Law’s Day
. Few people, including mothers-in-law, realize that the fourth Sunday in October, according to a resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1981, is set aside to honor mothers by marriage. To date, the resolution has not been adopted by the Senate, nor is there any recent activity to do so. Nonetheless, the greeting card industry continues to promote the idea and estimates that each year about 800,000 cards are given to mothers-in-law.

Grandparent’s Day
. As a result of legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, Grandparent’s Day is the Sunday after Labor Day. The person primarily responsible for pushing through the bill was a sixty-five-year-old grandparent from Atlanta, Georgia: Michael Goldgar.

Goldgar got the idea for the national holiday while visiting an elderly aunt confined to a nursing home. Through conversations, he learned that most of the home’s residents were grandparents. The majority of them had living children, but they preferred the relatively independent life in the home over a more dependent and hurdensome existence they felt would come from moving in with a child. For Goldgar, this brought to mind earlier times in history, when grandparents were the nucleus of an extended family, respected for their accumulated wisdom. The nursing home experience, coupled with his regret that so many families were being disrupted through divorce, led him to begin a grass-roots movement for a Grandparent’s Day.

Using eleven thousand dollars from his own savings, Goldgar commenced his first of seventeen trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby for legislation. After a seven-year struggle, he succeeded in getting a day honoring grandparents signed into law. Today Americans send their grandparents more than four million greeting cards a year.

Halloween: 5th Century
B.C
., Ireland

Even in ancient times, Halloween was a festival for witches, goblins, and ghosts, as well as for lighting bonfires and playing devilish pranks.

What has changed over the centuries are the reasons for dressing up ghoulishly, lighting fires, and acting mischievous. Now these things are done for fun—and by children; in the past, they were done in deathly earnest—and by adults.

Named “All Hallows Eve,” the festival was first celebrated by the ancient Celts in Ireland in the fifth century
B.C
. On the night of October 31, then the official end of summer, Celtic households extinguished the fires on their hearths to deliberately make their homes cold and undesirable to disembodied spirits. They then gathered outside the village, where a Druid priest kindled a huge bonfire to simultaneously honor the sun god for the past summer’s harvest and to frighten away furtive spirits.

The Celts believed that on October 31, all persons who had died in the previous year assembled to choose the body of the person or animal they would inhabit for the next twelve months, before they could pass peacefully into the afterlife. To frighten roving souls, Celtic family members dressed themselves as demons, hobgoblins, and witches. They paraded first inside, then outside, the fireless house, always as noisy and destructive as possible. Finally, they clamored along the street to the bonfire outside town. A villager, deemed by appearance or mannerism to be already possessed, could
be sacrificed in the fire as a lesson to other spirits contemplating human possession.

Halloween customs originated as a means of frightening away spirits eager to possess the living. The earliest American mischief night pranks: overturning outhouses and unhinging front gates
.

The Romans adopted Celtic Halloween practices, but in
A.D
. 61 they outlawed human sacrifice, substituting the Egyptian custom of effigies (called
ushabti
by the Egyptians, who buried scores of statuettes with a pharaoh in place of his living attendants, once entombed with their king). In time, as belief in spirit possession waned, the dire portents of many Halloween practices lightened to ritualized amusement.

Irish immigrants fleeing their country’s potato famine in the 1840s brought to America with them the Halloween customs of costume and mischief. The favorite pranks played by New England Irish youths on “mischief night” were overturning outhouses and unhinging front gates.

The Irish also brought with them a custom that New England agriculture forced them to modify. The ancient Celts had begun the tradition of a sort of jack-o’-lantern, a large turnip hollowed out and carved with a demon’s face and lighted from inside with a candle. Immigrants found few turnips in their new land but numerous fields of pumpkins. Whereas the Pilgrims had made the edible part of the pumpkin a hallmark of Thanksgiving, the Irish made the outer shell synonymous with Halloween.

It was also the Irish who originated the term
jack-o’-lantern
, taken from Irish folklore. As the legend goes, a man named Jack, notorious for his drunken and niggardly ways, tricked the devil into climbing up a tree. Quickly carving a cross into the tree’s trunk, Jack trapped Satan until he
swore he’d never again tempt Jack to sin. Upon his death. Jack found himself barred from the comforts of heaven for his repeated sinning, and also refused entrance to the heat of hell from an unforgiving Satan. Condemned to wander in frigid darkness until Judgment Day, he implored the devil for burning embers to light his way. Though Satan had embers in surplus, he allotted Jack a single coal that would last an agonizingly short time. Putting the ember into a turnip he had chewed hollow, he formed Jack’s lantern.

Trick or Treat
. The most widely accepted theory on the origins of trick-or-treating traces the practice to the ninth-century European custom of “souling.”

On All Soul’s Day, Christians walked from village to village begging for square biscuits with currants, called soul cakes. The beggars promised to offer up prayers for the dead relatives of the donors, the number of prayers to be proportional to the donors’ generosity. The quantity of prayers a dead person amassed was significant in a practical way, for limbo was the penitential layover stop on the journey to heaven, and sufficient prayer, even by an anonymous individual, greatly shortened the stay.

Thanksgiving: 1621, Plymouth, Massachusetts

Though the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving dinner, our celebration of the holiday today is due in large part to the tireless efforts of a nineteenth-century female editor of a popular ladies’ magazine.

The 102 Pilgrims who sailed on board the
Mayflower
, fleeing religious oppression, were well acquainted with annual thanksgiving day celebrations. The custom was ancient and universal. The Greeks had honored Demeter, goddess of agriculture; the Romans had paid tribute to Ceres, the goddess of corn; while the Hebrews had offered thanks for abundant harvests with the eight-day Feast of Tabernacles. These customs had never really died out in the Western world.

The Pilgrims, after a four-month journey that began in Holland, landed at Plymouth on December 11, 1620. Confronted with severe weather, and a plague that killed hundreds of local Indians, they had by the fall of 1621 lost forty-six of their own members, mainly to scurvy and pneumonia. The survivors, though, had something to be thankful for. A new and bountiful crop had been harvested. Food was abundant. And they were alive, in large part thanks to the assistance of one person: an English-speaking Pawtuxet Indian named Squanto, who was to stay by their side until his death two years later.

As a boy, Squanto had been captured by explorers to America and sold into slavery in Spain. He escaped to England, spent several years working for a wealthy merchant, and, considerably Anglicized, returned to his native Indian village just six months before the Pilgrims landed. He had helped them build houses and to plant and cultivate crops of corn and barley. In
the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims elected a new governor, William Bradford, and proclaimed a day of thanksgiving in their small town, which had seven private homes and four communal buildings.