What people celebrate says at least something about what they are. Compare, for example, a Briton who observes Yom Kippur to one who commemorates Hitler’s birthday.
Two extreme a juxtaposition? Fine. Let’s tone it down a notch. May Day and Pentecost? The Queen’s Birthday and the Fourth of July?
Anyway, you get the point. Our true selves reveal themselves in thousands of ways, not least in the dates we deem worthy of commemoration. A social anthropologist could have a field day just looking at the calendar.
March is the best time to conduct such a forensic investigation. For this month has three different holidays celebrating one part of mankind: women. I maintain that much can be said about a man on the basis of which of them he celebrates.
They are: International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrated on 8 March; Mother’s Day, falling on 14 March this year; Mothering Sunday, on the same day.
The first is communist, the second is secular, the third is Western Christian. Each is honoured by different groups, separated not so much by demarcation lines as fissures.
The esoteric origin of IWD can be traced back to the US, specifically the American Socialist Party (communist, as near as damn) that arbitrarily chose it to express solidarity with women on strike. But its real origin is in Russia, where the Bolsheviks declared it a national holiday directly they seized power.
Until recently this hallowed date was left uncommemorated and generally unknown in the West. It was only recognised by radical left-wingers, who found themselves on the margins of Western, especially Anglophone, societies.
However, their ideology has since moved from the margins into the mainstream, dragging this communist holiday with it. So what can our social anthropologist say about those who celebrate this day? He’d probably divide them into three sub-groups.
The smallest one are extreme lefties who celebrate all communist holidays. For example, I know a wealthy financier whose late wife, a Labour activist, used to organise annual parties on 22 April, Lenin’s birthday.
The second sub-group are feminists who too tend to lean to the left practically by definition. They react with kneejerk Pavlovian alacrity to any event celebrating any kind of women. If parliament voted to introduce Universal Prostitutes Day or Global Lesbians Day, these people would march in support. They might draw the line on International Ilse Koch Day, but not before that.
The third sub-group is much larger. It’s made up of ignoramuses who are unaware of the provenance of IWD and celebrate it simply because it’s there – or rather because the media make a big deal of it. This sub-group is more or less unobjectionable, although it too could be put forth as an argument for highly selective democracy.
Then comes Mother’s Day, a secular holiday that has supplanted Mothering Sunday and usurped its date. Like IWD, it also originated in America, a distinction it shares with many other modern perversions, though not with the downright evil ones, such as communism and Nazism. Being the first country constituted along modern, Enlightenment lines, the US was also the first to build an impassable barrier between state and religion.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution ostensibly protects freedom of religion. However, Thomas Jefferson and other Founders made it clear that their true goal was freedom not of religion, but from it. Thus, when the First Amendment was passed, Jefferson gloated that it built “a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Hence Christian holidays, other than Christmas Shopping, have been gradually squeezed out of public life, or else replaced with their secular, materialist equivalents – such as Mother’s Day.
It incongruously celebrates not just women who have given birth, but all women as such, defined in strictly biological terms. Even those terms are these days open to debate, what with even biology no longer seen as the sine qua non of womanhood. So it would be more consonant with the zeitgeist to say that Mother’s Day honours people born with a womb, those who’ve had it implanted and those who simply wish they had one.
Being secular, materialist, originally American and generally modern, Mother’s Day appeals to most Britons, thoroughly brainwashed as they are to salute anything meriting such modifiers. Since that group is vast, it’s easier to identify a much smaller one, those who refuse to acknowledge Mother’s Day.
Instead they observe Mothering Sunday, a day honouring not so much biological women as the sacred motherhood of the Virgin Mary and of the Church, the Bride of Christ.
This day is celebrated on the fourth Sunday of Lent by all Christians and especially conservative Christians. Actually, Mothering Sunday ought to be celebrated by all conservatives, even secular ones.
Conservatives, a term I sometimes use interchangeably with ‘intelligent people’, are sufficiently educated to recognise the Christian roots of Western civilisation. Hence they are sufficiently respectful of tradition to celebrate Christian festivals even if they themselves aren’t Christians. Christmas, Easter – and Mothering Sunday – are their holidays as well.
Mothering Sunday can never be free of such political connotations. It was slowly going out of fashion as the world became ever more secular, and only came back strongly in 1913, when the US Congress first ordained Mother’s Day.
Mothering Sunday immediately came back as a conservative reaction to modern cultural vandalism, and has been hanging on ever since. This restores the true, historical name of this sacred day, and conservatives ignore the secular impostor as staunchly as they defy IWD.
The upshot of this taxonomic narrative is self-evident: I wish no one a happy 8 March.