Mothers' Day

If December is the month of the Nativity, and April, as a rule, the month of the Resurrection, then May is the month of mothers.

And if there is any event that deserves to have a feast established for it, or any symbol worthy of our celebrating its memory every year, then motherhood most deserves to stand at the head of all that we keep feast for and celebrate.

The 14th of this month was Mothers' Day; Lebanon celebrated it, as did most of the civilized countries of the inhabited world. This tradition, which appoints the second Sunday of May as a day for mothers, goes back to the year 1908, when the state of Pennsylvania officially adopted it, and to 1914, when the United States adopted it and the other nations quickly followed, from Mexico by way of the countries of Europe as far as China.

By Edgar Poe, from a poem in which he addresses his wife's mother, whom he had taken as a mother to himself after being orphaned as an infant:

'I feel that when the angels whisper one to another in heaven, they can find, among all the burning terms of love they utter, not one that holds the reverence and the sweetness of the word: Mother.'