Tintin Forums

To all members who are mothers: have a very happy Mother's Day! :-)

Haven't we already had Mothers Day? I'm pretty sure it was a couple of months ago. I am worried now.

Rik

It's mothers day!!! I thought next week was fathers day!!!

jockosjungle
Haven't we already had Mothers Day?

In the U.K. what we celebrate is actually called “Mothering Sunday”, which is the fourth Sunday of Lent (it is also called Laetare Sunday and “Rose” Sunday), and is an old Church festival - it doesn’t actually celebrate motherhood, per se, but the “Mother Church”.

People were given time off to go home to their family (“mother”) church, and as this often involved returning to your mother, the practice of it being time to give your mother a bit of a holiday became linked.

The practice of celebrating Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May originated in the U.S. in the 19th C., and has spread to many parts of the world (there are also “Mother’s Days” in many countries too at other times of the year).

Update! Oh! I forgot to say - happy mother’s day to all the mums out there!

and is an old Church festival - it doesn’t actually celebrate motherhood, per se, but the “Mother Church

It may even have distant roots going even further back, before the arrival of Christianity to the British isles, with things like 'the mother goddess', what we may now call 'mother Earth'. Though this may not have actually occured on that day, it was more a part of getting recently baptised Christians to reconcile their old beliefs with their new ones.

SingingGandalf
It may even have distant roots going even further back, before the arrival of Christianity to the British isles, with things like 'the mother goddess'

Tenuous at best, I feel; I can find nothing which would lead me to see the connection. To make sense of it as an assimilated pagan festival, there would have to be a significant day which it took over from, and this I can’t find.

Furthermore it is a festival of an already established church, as it pre-supposes that there is a “mother” church to return to from whatever other parish you were in at the time, which places it well into the Christian era, rather than from the early church.

To make sense of it as an assimilated pagan festival, there would have to be a significant day which it took over from, and this I can’t find.

I admit, it is fairly tenuos.

To make sense of it as an assimilated pagan festival, there would have to be a significant day which it took over from, and this I can’t find.

We still don't know much about the pagan beliefs - they were varied and the only sources are archaeological evidence and sources that come from Christian missionaries that are biased against Paganism. There could have been a festival. I meant more to say that elements from Paganism did enter early British Christianity, such as that of the 'mother' figure.

I believe that the idea of a mother or father is also found everywhere - many countries (usually dictatorship's like the U.S.S.R, Communist China and Nazi Germany) refer to the motherland or fatherland, and the idea of a motherly figure is found in virtually all religions and cultures - the virgin Mary in catholicism, Fatima in Shia Islam, Kuan yin in China etc. These all come from early times, such as the belief in a mother Earth.