Time until Mother's Day

In the United States, Canada, Australia and around eighty other countries, Mother's Day falls on the second Sunday in May, so the date moves between the 8th and the 14th. Anna Jarvis campaigned for the American holiday and then spent years fighting its commercialisation. The United Kingdom and Ireland do not use this rule: Mothering Sunday there is the fourth Sunday in Lent, which usually falls in March. This countdown uses the second Sunday in May.

Bookings behave much as they do for the other large card and flower date: lunch sittings on the second Sunday in May fill weeks ahead, and florists treat it as their biggest weekend of the year, spreading deliveries across the Friday and Saturday because Sunday delivery is limited. A card posted from abroad needs a week or more in hand. The main practical trap is that the date is not international: a card sent from the United States to Britain arrives about two months after Mothering Sunday has been and gone, and families split across those countries often end up marking both. Many other countries use 8 March or a date tied to a local religious feast. Care homes and hospitals see their heaviest visiting hours of the year on the day, and some ask families to spread visits out.

Thailand keeps its mother's day on 12 August, the birthday of the late queen, and public buildings are decorated for it. Mexico and much of Central America use a fixed 10 May, so the day falls on a working weekday as often as not and schools hold their events in the morning. Ethiopia's Antrosht comes in the autumn and runs across several days at the end of the rainy season. The mistake made by anyone arranging a delivery is to assume every country moves the date to a Sunday: where the 10th is the rule, flowers timed for the second Sunday arrive after the event.

The next one falls on Sunday, 9 May 2027, and this page counts down to the midnight that starts it in whatever time zone your browser reports.

Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her own mother in Grafton, West Virginia in 1908 and campaigned until Woodrow Wilson proclaimed a national day in 1914. She insisted on the singular possessive, one mother rather than all mothers, and on the white carnation as the emblem. Within a decade she was suing florists and confectioners, denouncing the printed greeting card as evidence that people could not be bothered to write, and she was arrested at one point for disturbing a sale of carnations. She died in 1948 in a sanatorium, her bills paid, by several accounts, by people in the trade she had spent her life attacking.

The British occasion is older and entirely unrelated. Mothering Sunday is the fourth Sunday in Lent and originally meant returning to the church where you had been baptised, the mother church, with domestic service releasing girls for the day so they could go; simnel cake belongs to it. The two occasions merged in British practice during and after the Second World War under American influence, which is how a day with medieval roots ended up involving cards.