Is Mother’s Day this weekend or next? The festivity is one of the dates marked in red on the calendar each year; however, the day dedicated to mothers changes the date each year unlike what happens with Father’s Day as it is linked to the saints (March 19, San José).
In Spain, Mother’s Day is celebrated on the first Sunday of May, but, although there is only one mother, in the world there are twenty dates to honor the parents.
Thus, Mother’s Day 2023 in Spain is celebrated on Sunday, May 7. There are fewer days left to decide what detail to give to mothers and thank them for everything they do for their children.
The fact of celebrating Mother’s Day on the first Sunday of May may be consolidated in the collective imagination of Spain, but the truth is that this has been the case for only 58 years.
Catholicism in Europe began to honor the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus of Nazareth, on December 8, 1854, when Pope Pius IX declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Every December 8, the feast of the Immaculate Conception served to commemorate all the parents. The custom was maintained until the 1960s, when Galerías Preciados adopted the custom of celebrating Mother’s Day in May, in the image and likeness of what other countries do. Its competitor, El Corte Inglés, kept the date of December 8, so for some time Mother’s Day was celebrated in Spain, commercially, twice a year.
In 1965 Mother’s Day was definitively established on the first Sunday of May, a month associated with the Virgin Mary, thus also joining the ecclesiastical authorities.
The truth is that few countries besides Spain have that date: Portugal, South Africa, Hungary, Lithuania, Angola and Andorra. And it is that worldwide Mother’s Day is distributed in different pages of the calendar according to countries:
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