Celebrating Mother’s Day Around the World

Each and every year, families around the world celebrate Mother’s Day, a day honoring mothers and celebrating their love, self-sacrifice and dedication to their families. Mothers in Australia, the US, Japan, Brazil and many other countries will be showered this Sunday with gifts, flowers, breakfast in bed or all of the above. But not every country celebrates Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May each year. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Mother’s Day falls on the second Sunday of Lent in March and for Mother’s in Norway, well they’ve already celebrated it for the year back in February. Mothers in Russia will need to wait a little longer as the holiday falls on the last Sunday of November.

It is believed that Mother’s Day originated in the United States through a campaign driven by Anna Jarvis to honor her mother’s efforts during the Civil War. In 1908 the first Mother’s Day was held in Grafton, West Virginia and over the following years it spread throughout the US turning into a national holiday. It wasn’t long after that the holiday was commercialized and companies including Hallmark began selling Mother’s Day cards.

Soon enough other countries followed suit adopting the holiday and celebrating Mother’s Day annually. In the 1920’s, Germany and France adopted the holiday as a way to not only honor mothers but to encourage women to bear more children as a means of improving the declining birth rate in their countries. The 1920’s was a time where more and more women were entering the workforce and family sizes were shrinking as a result.

In Poland, the first ever Mother’s Day took place in 1914 in the city of Krakow and since is celebrated ever year on the 26th of May.

So to our Mother’s in our US office, we would like to wish you a wonderful Mother’s Day this Sunday! And for our Mother’s in our Polish office, you still have two more weeks to wait but nonetheless, Happy Mother’s Day to you too!

Argos Multilingual has already won twice the Best Company for Working Mothers award, a nationwide content in Poland organized by Rzeczpospolita Newspaper. We were the first Translation Company to win this award in Poland. We believe it is important to support working mothers and give them the flexibility to balance home and work life.