The founder of Mother’s Day hated greeting cards and candy. This is what she suggested instead

(NEXSTAR) – Perhaps no one hated the more modern traditions of Mother’s Day as much as the woman who created it.

Anna Jarvis, who successfully campaigned for a National Mother’s Day in the early 20th century, was finally so horrified by the commercialization of the party who tried to cancel everything.

“Mother’s Day is being desecrated,” Jarvis once said, according to an article published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch on Mother’s Day in 1944. “The telegraph companies with their prefabricated greetings, the florists with their high-pressure campaigns and hideous prices, and the candy and greeting-card manufacturers have made a fuss of my ideas.” .

When Jarvis initially had the idea of ​​what would become Mother’s Day, he envisioned a national day of remembrance and togetherness, to be observed with visitors (if possible), and symbolized by his own mother’s favorite flower: a carnation. white. But decades after organizing the first official commemoration of Mother’s Day in 1908, and successfully campaigning for it to be recognized nationally for years to come, she grew dissatisfied with the way the holiday had taken shape in the whole country.

Jarvis disliked greeting cards, calling them a “poor excuse for letters” favored by “lazy people”, and believed sweets to be a meaningless gesture because “someone but the mother usually eats them”.

In 1935, Jarvis even traveled to Washington, DC, to admonish the postmaster general for the release of commemorative Mother’s Day postage stamps, calling it “pure marketing,” according to the Post-Dispatch article.

So how did Jarvis, who was no fan of candy, cards or even commemorative stamps, expect the nation to celebrate its mothers? Well, by visiting her or sending her a long handwritten letter.

“She said, you know, if you really want to do something for your mother… If you could go see her, you really should,” Olive Ricketts, director of the Anna Jarvis Museum, said in a 2016 interview with NPR. “But she said the second best thing is to write her a long handwritten letter. She doesn’t use other people’s words to tell your mom how you feel because they don’t really know how you feel about your mom.”

But by 1943, Jarvis had had enough of candy and cards. He began calling for Mother’s Day to be scrapped altogether, but his efforts were interrupted when she “wandered into Philadelphia General Hospital,” where workers observed that she was emaciated and nearly blind, the Post reported. -Dispatch. She was committed to the Marshall Square Sanitarium in Westchester, where she lived until her death in 1948 at the age of 84.

Having never benefited from Mother’s Day, Jarvis also had no money when he entered the sanitarium. Floral and greeting card industry executives, however, took the bills from him.