Happy Mother's Day & Commerce

Commercialization of Mother's day began very early, and only nine years after the first official Mother's Day had became so rampant that Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become, spending all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration. She criticized the practice of purchasing greeting cards, which she saw as a sign of being too lazy to write a personal letter. She was arrested in 1948 for disturbing the peace while protesting against the commercialization of Mother's Day, and she finally said that she "...wished she would have never started the day because it became so out of control ..."

Commercialization has ensured that the holiday has continued, when other holidays from the same time, like Children's Day and Temperance Sunday, do not now have the same level of popularity.