She carried you. She worried for you. She still does. And once a year, the world tries to repay that debt with $34 billion worth of flowers, jewelry, and brunch. The story of how Mother’s Day became a global commercial empire β and what it says about the way we really treat mothers.
She’s up before you are. She was up before you were born. She is the person whose voice you still hear in your head when you are about to do something stupid, and the person you call when you actually go ahead and do it anyway. She is, by most measures, the most important human being in your life. And once a year, you buy her a card.
Not just you. Nearly everyone does it. In the United States alone, some 84 percent of adults will celebrate Mother’s Day in 2025, spending an average of $259 each β a total of $34.1 billion across the country on a single Sunday in May. Add up the spending in the United Kingdom, where Mothering Sunday in March generates Β£2.4 billion. Factor in Brazil’s Dia das MΓ£es, Japan’s Haha no Hi, France’s FΓͺte des MΓ¨res, Mexico’s DΓa de las Madres, Australia, Canada, Thailand, and dozens of others. The global total climbs toward $35 billion and beyond. More money changes hands in the name of motherhood, in a single week, than the entire GDP of several small nations.
It is a staggering figure. It is also, depending on your perspective, either a beautiful testament to the universal human impulse to honor the people who made us, or a monument to the ease with which our most genuine feelings can be turned into someone else’s profit. Probably it is both. This is the complicated, sentimental, commercially brilliant, occasionally troubling, genuinely moving story of what the world has done with Mother’s Day.
The Woman Who Made It β And Wanted It Back
Here is what you probably don’t know about Mother’s Day: the woman who created it spent the second half of her life trying to destroy it.
Her name was Anna Jarvis, and she was born in 1864 in Webster, West Virginia, the ninth of eleven children, seven of whom did not survive to adulthood. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was a community organizer and activist who spent her life caring for her neighbors with a devotion that transcended the boundaries of the Civil War β she organized women to care for soldiers on both sides, and afterward promoted what she called Mothers’ Friendship Day, bringing Union and Confederate families into the same room to weep and shake hands. When Ann Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter decided that this woman β and all women like her β deserved a national day of recognition.
Anna Jarvis campaigned with a ferocity that would have done credit to a modern-day lobbying firm. She wrote thousands of letters. She buttonholed politicians. She organized. She persuaded. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the proclamation making Mother’s Day an official national holiday: the second Sunday of May, every year. Anna Jarvis was 49. She had no children of her own. She had just changed the world.
Then she watched the world change her holiday.
Within a decade, the carnation she had chosen as the holiday’s symbol β white, for reverence; worn to honor mothers living and dead β was being sold at inflated prices by florists who had recognized in Mother’s Day a windfall. Greeting cards were on shelves before the ink was dry on Wilson’s proclamation. Candy companies ran promotions. Department stores held sales. “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world,” Jarvis wrote, with a sharpness that the greeting-card industry preferred to ignore.
In 1925, she was arrested β arrested β for disturbing the peace after crashing a confectioner’s convention in Philadelphia where the candy industry was raising money in Mother’s Day’s name. She spent the final years of her life nearly blind, in a sanatorium in Pennsylvania, having exhausted her inheritance in legal battles against the forces of commerce she had unleashed. She died in 1948, penniless. There is a legend β unverified but too perfect not to repeat β that the floral and greeting-card industries quietly paid a portion of her medical bills.
“She told me, with terrible bitterness, that she was sorry she had ever started Mother’s Day,” one acquaintance recalled.
In 2025, Americans will spend $3.2 billion on flowers for Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis’s carnation has had quite a century.
The Machine Behind the Moment
To understand the scale of what has been built in Anna Jarvis’s name, you have to follow the roses.
The flowers that will arrive on American doorsteps the second Sunday of every May β the peonies, lilies, tulips, and above all the roses β do not begin their journeys in American suburbs. Most of them begin in the highlands of Colombia, at altitudes above 8,000 feet, where cool temperatures and intense sunlight produce blossoms of unusual quality. Workers β mostly women, rising before dawn in the BogotΓ‘ Savanna β cut stems, grade petals, bundle flowers into tight cylinders, and load them onto refrigerated trucks bound for El Dorado International Airport. From there, they travel in temperature-controlled cargo holds to Miami International Airport, which during the weeks surrounding Mother’s Day handles enough flower cargo to stock every florist from Maine to California.
In a recent Mother’s Day season, over 400 flights transported flowers from Colombia and Ecuador, delivering some 552 million stems β a 93% increase compared to the volume moved during a typical three-week period. The logistics operation is a feat of cold-chain engineering that would impress a pharmaceutical company. A rose cut in Colombia on Monday can be arranged in a Connecticut vase by Wednesday. The entire system exists to ensure that when you want to say “I love you, Mom” with flowers, the flowers are there.
Today, nearly 80% of cut flowers sold in the U.S. originate from Colombia and Ecuador. Colombia alone operates over 10,000 hectares of flower farms, generating $2 billion in annual exports. The Dutch flower auctions at Aalsmeer β one of the largest commercial buildings in the world β serve as the global clearinghouse, moving supply from Latin American and African producers toward European retail markets. The Netherlands contributes around 68% of total global floral production by value, acting as the world’s flower exchange.
And yet. 70 percent of Colombian flower workers are women. The industry provides formal employment in a region that has historically lacked it, and that is genuinely valuable. But labor rights organizations have documented conditions on some plantations that the consumers buying the resulting bouquets might find uncomfortable: short-term contracts that do not survive pregnancy; peak-season work weeks that stretch toward 80 hours; pesticide exposure that remains an occupational health concern. Local florists can do 15-20% of their annual revenue during the Mother’s Day holiday. The economics of the flower industry depend on the compressed windows created by holidays like this one β and the humans who sustain those economics often occupy the most economically vulnerable positions in the chain.
In 2025, a new variable entered the equation. The Trump administration’s imposition of a 10% universal tariff on imported goods in April β applied with minimal notice, just weeks before the industry’s biggest event β landed directly on the floral sector’s most sensitive week. Abraham Hakakian, the vice president of Plants N’ Petals in Houston, said he saw a 10-20% increase in the price of flowers. Online florist Bouqs shifted sourcing for vases away from China and accepted slimmer margins. “This is like our Super Bowl,” CEO Kim Tobman told Bloomberg. Many small florists found themselves doing math they had not anticipated, calculating whether to absorb the extra cost themselves or tell their customers that Mom’s flowers cost more this year because of trade policy.
What We Actually Buy
Let’s talk about the $34.1 billion. Here is where it goes.
The most popular gift categories remain flowers (74%), greeting cards (73%) and special outings such as dinner or brunch (61%). Consumers will spend a total of $6.8 billion on jewelry, $6.3 billion on special outings and $3.5 billion on gift cards. Total spending on flowers is expected to reach $3.2 billion, while total spending on greeting cards is expected to reach $1.1 billion.
Jewelry leads in total spending β for the eighth consecutive year. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not simply that jewelers have outsmarted the competition. A piece of jewelry lasts. It carries its occasion with it. The necklace you give your mother in 2025 will still be meaningful when she wears it in 2035, calling the day to mind in a way that a restaurant meal, however beautiful, cannot. The jewelers understood this early and priced it accordingly.
Mother’s Day is the day of the year when the largest number of people dine out at a restaurant. That fact surprises people at first, and then doesn’t. Of course the nation’s most-celebrated caregiver, on the one day a year dedicated to her, gets taken somewhere she doesn’t have to cook. When it comes to food, steak orders surged 88%, and seafood wasn’t far behind with an 83% increase. Wine sales were up 50% compared to a typical Sunday. People spend more. They order better. They tip well. The restaurants price accordingly β brunch tickets on Mother’s Day run about 32% higher than a typical Sunday β and the holiday has become, for the restaurant industry, the single most important day of the commercial year.
About 1.5 billion greeting card purchases are for Christmas, with Mother’s Day coming in second. Which means that despite everything β despite texts, emails, video calls, and social media tributes posted for all to see β more than 100 million Americans still go to a store (or a website) and choose a piece of paper with words printed on it to express what they feel for their mothers. There is something genuinely moving about that, even for those of us who are suspicious of Hallmark’s motives.
Around the World: Mother’s Day Has Many Faces
Here is what most Americans don’t realize: Mother’s Day is not one holiday. It is dozens of holidays, sharing a name and a sentiment but shaped by the particular history, culture, and traditions of each place that observes it.
In the United Kingdom, the holiday is called Mothering Sunday, and it falls on the fourth Sunday of Lent β in 2025, that was March 30. The date comes not from Anna Jarvis but from the medieval church, when apprentices and servants were given leave to return to their home parish β their “mother church” β and bring gifts of food and flowers to their mothers. Lenten fasts were relaxed for the day. Children picked wildflowers along the route. The traditional Simnel cake, a fruitcake with marzipan, was baked for the occasion. By the mid-twentieth century, the American commercial version of the holiday had gradually overlaid these older traditions, but the date remained, tied to the ecclesiastical calendar. UK consumer spending for Mother’s Day is set to hit Β£2.4bn this year, marking a 5% rise on 2024.
In Mexico, DΓa de las Madres falls every year on May 10, regardless of the day of the week β a fixed date that reflects the holiday’s place at the center of Mexican cultural life. Schools spend weeks preparing; children perform dances and songs for their mothers and attend special masses. The most devoted families hire mariachi bands to serenade their mothers at dawn with “Las MaΓ±anitas.” “The mother here is a very important figure,” one Mexico City mother said. “The country stops when it’s Mother’s Day here.”
Japan celebrates Haha no Hi on the second Sunday of May, with red carnations β a symbol of maternal love and endurance β and home-cooked meals. Children draw portraits of their mothers at school and sometimes enter them in art contests. The gift is inseparable from the meaning: in Japanese culture, where the vocabulary of care is expressed through careful, considered action, the act of choosing and presenting the right flower carries significant weight.
In France, La FΓͺte des MΓ¨res falls on the last Sunday of May β unless it conflicts with Pentecost, in which case it moves to June β and centers on the family dinner: a large meal at which the mother is the honored guest, with children reciting poems or presenting small gifts they have made. In France, a remarkable 76% of Mother’s Day shoppers buy via mobile devices, with an average online order around β¬50.
Thailand’s Mother’s Day falls on August 12th, the birthday of Queen Sirikit, the Queen Mother. It has a civic dimension entirely absent from Western versions β jasmine flowers, chosen for their white color and associations with maternal purity, are presented at school ceremonies that blend familial and patriotic sentiment.
Mother’s Day is one of the most symbolic dates in the Brazilian calendar β and also one of the most commercial. In 2025, 82% of Brazilians intended to celebrate the date, with 71% planning to give gifts β a significant jump from 58% the prior year.
What unites all these versions β the mariachi serenade, the Simnel cake, the Japanese carnation, the Brazilian gift β is the universality of the impulse being expressed. Every human culture has recognized, in some way, the particular labor of motherhood. What varies is the form that recognition takes, and the degree to which commerce has been invited to assist.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Talk About
There is a quietly absurd irony at the heart of Mother’s Day. We set aside one day a year to honor the people who perform, every other day of the year, an enormous quantity of invisible, unpaid, exhausting labor β and then we celebrate them by asking them to watch us spend money.
Consider what that labor actually consists of. Research from the Better Life Lab at New America reveals that women spend an average of 37% more time on unpaid domestic work than men, even when both partners are employed full-time. And that is just the physical work. What researchers call the “mental load” β the cognitive and emotional labor of planning, organizing, anticipating, and managing β falls disproportionately on mothers in ways that physical task lists do not capture.
The mental load isn’t about the physical tasks of parenting and running a household β it’s about the constant, invisible management of those tasks. It’s remembering when the doctor’s appointment is, knowing the shoe sizes, noticing the toilet paper is running low, planning meals, buying birthday presents, scheduling dentist visits, signing permission slips, keeping track of school spirit days, and organizing family holidays.
This labor does not stop. It runs on a background loop, around the clock, even when the mother is at her paid job, even when she is sleeping. 65% of working parents report burnout, with mothers bearing the brunt. According to a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, 41% of parents reported they feel unable to function most days due to stress, and 48% said they are completely overwhelmed by it. The US Surgeon General issued a public health advisory warning about the intensity of pressures on modern parents, with mothers taking the heaviest share.
One day of brunch and carnations does not resolve any of this. The holiday’s critics β and there are genuine, thoughtful ones β point out that Mother’s Day allows us to feel that we have adequately honored the institution of motherhood while doing nothing to change the conditions under which mothering actually occurs. We buy the card; we don’t lobby for parental leave. We make the restaurant reservation; we don’t redistribute the mental load. The flowers die by Thursday. The invisible labor resumes by Monday.
This is perhaps unfair to what the holiday actually accomplishes β which is, at minimum, the creation of an occasion for expressed gratitude, which most mothers say they want. On Mother’s Day, 74% of moms and those identifying as mother figures expressed a desire to celebrate by spending quality time with their families. The brunch is not a substitute for systemic change; it is an expression of genuine love that most mothers value on its own terms. Both things can be true at once.
The Holiday That Hurts
Not everyone can celebrate Mother’s Day straightforwardly. This is worth saying plainly, because the holiday’s commercial and cultural machinery tends to assume a universal participation that does not match lived experience.
For individuals struggling with infertility, Mother’s Day can be a painful reminder of unfulfilled dreams, leading to feelings of sadness, failure, and isolation. In the United States, approximately 12 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 44 have impaired fertility. When social media floods with tributes and restaurant promotions for a holiday you cannot participate in because the biology did not cooperate, the cultural surround of the occasion β the relentless cheerfulness of it β can feel like a kind of violence.
For those navigating infertility, pregnancy loss, or the deep longing to become a parent, Mother’s Day can be incredibly painful. It can feel isolating when social media fills with celebrations while you carry a quieter grief.
For those who have lost their mothers, the holiday is a different kind of test. The first Mother’s Day after a mother’s death is a thing that many people describe as unexpectedly brutal β all of the commercial machinery aimed directly at the wound. Flowers everywhere. Restaurant reservations that make you think of the table where she used to sit. The card section in the drugstore, which you should perhaps avoid.
For those with complicated relationships with their mothers β the estranged, the abused, the children of addiction or neglect or simple human failure β Mother’s Day is an annual reminder that the holiday assumes a version of maternal love that their experience does not confirm. The obligation to celebrate, or to explain why they are not celebrating, is its own kind of pain.
Modern Mother’s Day now encompasses a spectrum of caregiving roles, including stepmothers, adoptive mothers, and non-binary or transgender individuals who fulfill parental roles. The holiday has expanded its definition of who counts as a mother, which is a genuine and overdue recognition. A survey conducted in 2025 showed that 42% of individuals plan to celebrate figures such as stepmothers, grandmothers, or other influential women who have acted as mother figures. That is a meaningful shift.
Anna Jarvis, for what it’s worth, was herself childless. She created Mother’s Day in honor of her own mother, not in celebration of motherhood as a state she inhabited. The holiday was always, at its origin, about the relationship β the specific, particular love between one person and the woman who raised them β rather than about any biological condition. The expansion of its constituency is, in that sense, faithful to the spirit she intended, if not the commercial form she deplored.
Gen Z Is Changing the Game
Something is shifting in how the holiday is celebrated, and it has to do with who is doing the celebrating. Millennials and Generation Z β who are now the primary gift-buyers, purchasing for their own mothers rather than their children β bring different expectations to Mother’s Day than their predecessors did.
They are more likely to shop online. 35.9% of consumers plan to shop online, up 1.4% from the prior year, and 24.8% at local/small businesses. They are more likely to discover gift ideas through TikTok and Instagram, where the content that drives purchase decisions is increasingly coming from micro-influencers β creators with 10,000 to 100,000 followers β rather than from traditional advertising.
They are more likely to choose experiences over objects. Over 40% of Mother’s Day gift spending in 2024 was on experiences, such as afternoon tea, spa days, and short breaks. The logic of this is partly generational β a cohort that has been told by every lifestyle brand that memories outlast possessions β and partly economic: in an era of housing unaffordability and student debt, an experiential gift can feel more meaningful than a material one while being, paradoxically, harder to price-compare.
They are more likely to care about the ethics of what they are buying. 76% say eco-friendliness is important when selecting Mother’s Day gifts. Whether that stated preference translates into actual purchasing behavior is a question the data does not fully resolve β people reliably tell surveyors that they will pay more for ethical products, and then reliably don’t, at least not as much as they claim. But the direction of travel is clear: younger consumers want to feel good about the provenance of their gifts, and brands that can credibly claim sustainable, ethical, or locally sourced credentials have a meaningful advantage.
They are also, this year, spending somewhat less. According to a LendingTree survey, those giving Mother’s Day gifts will spend 14% less this year β and 56% of gift givers say inflation and the current economy impact how much they plan to spend. The tariffs, the cost of living, the general atmosphere of economic anxiety β it is all visible in the gift-buying data. The sentimentality of the occasion is powerful, but it is not infinitely powerful. When money is tight, even the guilt engine has its limits.
What the World Spends Its Love On
Let’s return, for a moment, to the sheer scale of what has been built.
In the BogotΓ‘ Savanna, flower workers rise before dawn to grow the roses. In Colombian towns near the flower farms, economies are organized around the two weeks before Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. In Miami, cargo handlers process 370 flights of flowers in three weeks. In Kansas City, Hallmark’s design team works months ahead to develop the card that will make you cry in the greeting-card aisle. In thousands of restaurants across America, chefs are planning prix fixe menus and calculating how many covers they can do in a single Sunday. In spas and hotels and afternoon tea rooms, capacity is booked weeks in advance. On Etsy, independent artisans who make personalized jewelry and keepsake gifts are scaling their operations to manage a surge in orders that will represent a disproportionate share of their annual income.
All of this exists β the entire global apparatus β because a woman in West Virginia missed her mother. Because Anna Jarvis heard her mother say, once, that she hoped someone would found a memorial Mother’s Day. Because grief, properly directed, can move governments. And because the florists of Philadelphia, who were in the room that first Sunday in 1908 when Anna handed out carnations, recognized immediately what she had given them.
The machine she built β or rather, the machine that was built using her creation as its engine β is extraordinary in its scale and in its emotional intelligence. It has understood, better than almost any other commercial enterprise, that the most durable market is the one that sells people back their own feelings. That the thing people most want to buy is not a product but a relationship β or rather, a way to express a relationship that resists ordinary expression.
The psychology behind gift-giving tells a story. Thoughtful, personalized gifts tap into an innate desire to show love and foster connection. Whether it’s flowers, a handwritten note, or time spent together, the gesture matters far more than its monetary value. The market has learned this, and has responded by building products that simulate the gesture of thoughtfulness at industrial scale.
Whether the gesture, thus scaled, retains its meaning is the central question that Mother’s Day poses every year, and that every year goes unanswered.
The Gift That Lasts
Here is something that the spending data doesn’t capture: the conversations.
The phone calls that go longer than expected on that second Sunday in May. The old photographs that come out at brunch, because someone thought to bring them. The stories that get told β about the car trips when everyone was small, the dinners that somehow became family mythology, the particular way she laughed. The things you say to her face, or write in the card (the one you actually wrote in, not just signed), that you should probably say more often but don’t.
That is the original product of Mother’s Day. That is what Anna Jarvis had in mind when she organized that first church service in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908. That is what her mother was asking for when she said she hoped someone would found a memorial mothers day: not the commerce, but the attention. Not the flowers, but the presence.
In 2025, surveys indicate that approximately 70% of individuals cite emotional connections, rather than material gifts, as the most important aspect of the holiday.
Which means that after $34.1 billion in annual spending, after a century of florists and card-makers and jewelers and restaurateurs, after the cold-chain logistics and the Miami cargo flights and the prix fixe brunch and the Pandora charm bracelet β the thing people actually want from Mother’s Day is the thing that costs nothing at all.
Anna Jarvis would have approved.
The florists will continue to miss her point. And the Colombian flower workers will continue to rise before dawn. And somewhere on the second Sunday of May β and the last Sunday of March in Britain, and the 10th of May in Mexico, and the second Sunday of May in Brazil, and the 12th of August in Thailand β a billion or so people will try, in the ways available to them, to say to the women who made them: I know. I see you. I am grateful you are here.
The market has found a thousand ways to help them say it. Whether they need all those ways, or just one good one, is still the question. It always has been.
A Note on the Numbers
Total U.S. Mother’s Day spending data from the National Retail Federation’s 2025 annual survey, conducted with Prosper Insights & Analytics. UK spending data from GlobalData and Mintel. Brazilian data from Globo/PiniOn. Flower supply chain data from LATAM Cargo and Maersk. Mother’s Day is observed on the second Sunday of May in the United States, Canada, Australia, India, and more than 70 other countries; on the fourth Sunday of Lent in the United Kingdom and Ireland; on May 10 in Mexico; on the last Sunday of May in France; on August 12 in Thailand. In more than 100 countries, some version of the holiday is celebrated. In all of them, someone is growing flowers.