Does Mothers Day have an apostrophe?

Maybe questions like this don’t bother you too much. If this is the case, to some degree, you are one of the lucky ones. For the pedants amongst us, and the Grammar Police watching over us, such language-based savagery is just one punctuation mark too far.

Mother’s Day is a time of joy and love

• “The influence of a mother in the lives of her children is beyond calculation.” – James E. Faust
• “There is no role in life that is more essential than that of motherhood.” – Elder M. Russell Ballard
• “A mother’s hug lasts long after she lets go.” – Unknown
• “Mother is a verb. It’s something you do. Not just who you are.” – Cheryl Lacey Donovan
• “All that I am, or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.” – Abraham Lincoln

Mother’s day is a time to think about the many ways in which your mother brightens up your day.

Let her know how much you care and how much you think about her … think about twofishe.com.

I found these Mother’s Day quotes on Shutterfly.com, there are many more and there’s even advice on how to use them. Inspirational, but they don’t help me to answer the question: does Mothers Day have an apostrophe?

When is Mother’s Day?

It all depends on where you are in the world.

In the UK, the date for Mother’s Day changes every year.

Mother’s Day is derived from Mothering Sunday, a church tradition when Christians who had moved away from the parish would return to their “mother church”. Mothering Sunday became the day when domestic servants were given the day off to visit their “mother church”, usually with their mothers and other family members.

The dates for Lent and Easter change every year because they are based on the Christian (lunar) Calendar. Mother’s Day falls three weeks before Easter, on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Mother’s Day in the US wasn’t derived from any religion, and in the US it’s in the middle of May. The campaign for the national observance of Mother’s Day in the US was started by the West Virginian, Anna Jarvis, who campaigned for a holiday in honour of her mother who was a community activist. It became officially recognised in 1914 when the then president, Woodrow Wilson, declared the second Sunday in May as a day of ‘public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.’

Mother’s Day has an apostrophe

Grabbed from Google: An apostrophe is a small punctuation mark ( ‘ ) placed after a noun to show that the noun owns something. The apostrophe will always be placed either before or after an s at the end of the noun owner.

There is an apostrophe here because there is possession. So now that we know when we should be observing Mother’s Day, or is it Mothers’ Day, we should be asking: am I observing it for me and my mother, or am I observing it for all the mothers, everywhere?

Where does the Apostrophe go?

Here’s the thing, both placements are grammatically correct, and both make sense within the given historical contexts.

If I put the apostrophe before the ‘s’, it’s for me and my own mother; if I put the apostrophe after the ‘s’, it’s for me and everybody’s mother, and I don’t have enough cards.

I think Woodrow Wilson wanted us to observe the day and for each of us to appreciate our own mother, and he wanted us all to recognise that we should all be doing just that.

Does Mothers Day have an apostrophe?

The answer is Yes it does, for me, it’s Mother’s Day and it’s usually on the fourth Sunday of Lent.