How does United States mark Mother's Day?
Mother's Day
- Local date
- May 9, 2027
- When is it?
- The second Sunday of May (established by a 1914 joint resolution of Congress)
Mother's Day in the United States comes from a joint resolution of Congress approved on 8 May 1914 designating the second Sunday in May. President Wilson promptly issued a proclamation directing government buildings to fly the flag and inviting people to fly it at home as a public expression of love for the country's mothers. It is a designated observance rather than a federal holiday — nobody gets the day off, and the formal core of it was flag display, later buried under gifts and restaurant bookings.Worth setting beside it is Father's Day: the same legislative route was only completed for it in 1972, fifty-eight years later than Mother's Day. The gap between the two dates in institutional time is sharper than the gap between them in commercial scale.
What is this topic?
Four places keep Mother's Day on the second Sunday of May; Indonesia keeps it on 22 December — and there it is not a day for thanking mothers but a political commemoration of the first Indonesian Women's Congress of 1928. This page compares how the day was established in each place: a congressional resolution, a statute that names it and explicitly gives no day off, a peak in the cut-flower trade, or the starting point of a women's movement.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.