A day to cash in

I woke up to beautiful flowers, cd’s, breakfast in bed, coffee, chocolates and the best ever handmade card made by the creative hands of my seven year old son.  Wonderful!  What a way to start mother’s day!  So I lay there for a while contemplating getting up and thinking better of it lay there for a little while longer.  I listened to my son and husband happily playing football in the garden and began reflecting on the wonders of being a mum ... and how lucky I am to have such a lovely family. I began to think about the origins of mother’s day and who and why it was invented, so I spontaneously switched on my lap top and started to do a little research and this was probably the most concise description I found:

‘The modern version of Mother's Day with families bringing Mother's Day flowers to their moms can be traced back to seventeenth century England. Mothering Sunday was the fourth Sunday in Lent...a special day when all the strict rules about fasting and penance were put aside. Older children who were away from home learning a trade or working as servants were allowed to return home for Mothering Sunday.”

Great!  Exactly as I thought or thereabouts ... no great big fuss, just a day where mums get to see their kids and put some pretty flowers on the table!   I looked again at my gifts and knowing my husband had actually bought the CD’s, chocolates and flowers (which of course is very nice of him!) well nice of ‘us’ actually because no doubt he used the joint account to pay for them!  But somehow the value to me of those gifts are lessened by the fact that my son didn’t really have much input, and they seemed so commercial compared to the lovely card... which of course is my favourite thing!  That card symbolises the love my son has for me, the way he has thought about me for more than 3 seconds and created something unique, thought-out and lovely!  So all the other stuff was it really necessary ...to be honest not really ... a homemade card from my son ... priceless! 

My thoughts soon turned to the commercial element of mothers day and how much money is spent buying gifts such as the CD’s I received for mother’s day and the only figures I could find relate to 2006 when spending on mother’s day was 1billion pounds in the UK alone!  Wow that is madness.   Yes it probably does give the shops an extra boost which in this climate I’m all for but when £1 of every £7 of your hard earned cash is actually spent in Tesco ... then what impact is there really on local businesses?  Probably not much ... Oh I know Christmas is the same, and Easter and Valentine’s Day ... but for some reason Mothers day is the one that gets me.  Maybe, it’s because I don’t want money spending on me, the fuss or the feeling that kids are being forced to show love for their parents ... whatever the reason next year I don’t want anything, I have of course said this every year  but this time I really mean it... especially when I found out that the CD’s, flowers and chocolates were all bought from ... you guessed it Tesco!

Blog created by Michele Bentham from The Launchpad