This is an accepted version of this page Mother's Day is an annual holiday celebrated in the United States on the second Sunday in May.

It was established by Anna Jarvis, with the first Mother's Day celebrated through a service of worship at St. Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, West Virginia, on May 10, 1908.

[2] Popular observances include holiday card and gift giving, churchgoing often accompanied by the distribution of carnations, and family dinners.

A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War.

Myron Daughterty who was distraught because an anti-temperance group had forced his son and two other temperance advocates at gunpoint to spend the night in a saloon and become publicly drunk.

Blakeley's two sons, both traveling salesmen, were so moved that they vowed to return each year to pay tribute to her and embarked on a campaign to urge their business contacts to do likewise.

At their urging, in the early 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Albion set aside the second Sunday in May to recognize the special contributions of mothers.

[12] A small service was held on May 12, 1907, in the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna's mother had been teaching Sunday school.

[19] The Saint Andrews Methodist Church, where the first celebration was held, is now the International Mother's Day Shrine and is a National Historic Landmark.

[27] In part due to the shortage of white carnations, and in part due to the efforts to expand the sales of more types of flowers in Mother's Day, florists invented the idea of wearing a pink carnation if your mother was living, or a white one if she was dead; this was tirelessly promoted until it made its way into the popular observations at churches.

Only nine years after the first official Mother's Day, it had become so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a prominent opponent of what the holiday had become,[23][29] spending all her inheritance and the rest of her life fighting what she saw as an abuse of the celebration.

From 2014 to 2019, the NASCAR Cup Series hosted the Digital Ally 400 at Kansas Speedway on Saturday of Mother's Day weekend.

In 2020, the Blue-Emu Maximum Pain Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway was scheduled to take place on the Saturday of Mother's Day weekend (although that race was postponed until June).

From 2007–2018, The Players Championship men's golf tournament was held on Mother's Day weekend, except in 2011 and 2014 when May 1 fell on a Sunday.