Mother's Day
If you celebrate Mother's Day then this is your two-week warning! This year it takes place on Sunday, March 19th. So mark your calendar, set a phone reminder, and start thinking about how you can roll out the red carpet for the Mum in your life.
Why do we celebrate Mother's Day?
In an ideal world, we'd show our Mums how much we appreciate them every day, but stuff happens, busy days turn into weeks, and life gets in the way. Luckily, we have that one dedicated date each year when we get a whole day to let Mothers know just how great we think they are.
Mother's Day isn't a new idea, in fact, it's been around in some form since the Ancient Greeks, who held spring celebrations for Rhea, the goddess of fertility, motherhood, and generation. But did you know that Mother's Day in the UK was originally a religious holiday? Mothering Sunday started out as a special service where churchgoers would return to their 'mother church' on the fourth Sunday in Lent. Over time, the religious side of the day turned into a more general celebration of Mothers. And by the 1800s, the Victorians were giving their Mums flowers and gifts.
Mother's Day mainly became the huge deal it is today because of the US women's rights campaigner Anna Jarvis. After her Mum died in 1905, Anna came up with the idea of having a special 'Mother's Day' to honour the sacrifices mothers made for their children. She lobbied the government to recognise Mother's Day as an official holiday, arguing that holidays in America were biased towards male achievements. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a motion to officially recognise Mother's Day as a National holiday, and huge events started being held at churches and department stores across the US. And the rest is history!
What should you buy your Mum for Mother's Day?
Everyone has their own traditions and ideas about how to celebrate and spoil their Mum on Mother's Day. Some people just give their Mum a call to let her know they care - did you know there are more phone calls made on Mother's Day than any other in the year?! Even Christmas! Or you might cook your Mum lunch, or take her out somewhere lovely - Mothering Sunday is THE most popular day of the year for restaurant bookings, fact fans.
Gifting on Mother's Day is a tricky one, 'Don't buy me anything' your Mum has probably said to you (but you know she doesn't mean it and will be silently fuming if you don't get her a gift). Some people think Mother's Day has become way too commercialised and we need to get back to basics and make it more about spending meaningful time with each other. We're down with that, and from a sustainability point of view, the last thing the world needs is people buying lots of stuff they don't need that will end up in landfill in a few weeks.
We only use recycled precious metals to make our pieces. This means that no new metals have been mined to make your gift, and you're bypassing the environmental damage and human rights abuses that in some cases can go hand in hand with gold and silver mining. You're re-using a resource that's already out in the world. AND we only make our jewellery from sterling silver and solid gold, which means it won't go that horrible green colour, and any tarnishing can always be removed with polish and a good rub with a cloth.
We've worked hard to make sure all our packaging is entirely plastic-free. So when your Mum opens her gift on Mother's Day there will be no foam pads or plastic boxes that will spend hundreds of years on landfill sites, just a beautifully designed box made of recycled paper and a pad that's cleverly made from corn fibre.
And that's not all, for the past two years we've been planting a tree with Ecologi for every order we make. This helps to offset the carbon created when we make and ship jewellery to our customers - you can see how many trees we're up to here.
Last but not least: each of our designs is intended to be a forever piece our customers will love for years to come, rather than something fashion-led they won't want in a few months. So you can get your Mum something really meaningful and special that she'll treasure. It could even become a family heirloom that gets passed on to the next generation - fingers crossed!