Things that make you go, “Hmm…”
Today is Mother’s Day in the US, but it’s strangely difficult to believe that it has been a year since the last one. Last year, I mused about the origins of the US version of the holiday, and I also discussed what I was wandering about doing.
This year, it has been even more abbreviated. And here’s why:
To circumvent the inevitable rush of reservations for Mother’s Day luncheons and dinners, I’d arranged for the dinner a couple of days ago, on a leisurely Friday– when hopefully fewer people would be engaging in Mother’s Day celebrations. Apparently, I was partially correct. At my mother’s favorite local restaurant, it was certainly not as crowded as the hostess said it would be (later today, ‘natch), but she said that they had been taking call-aheads (which are “sort of” like reservations) for today for about a week. Go figure. 
And the restaurant, when I had arrived, was certainly packed, with a lot of tables cobbled together to support larger dining parties… evidently, I was not the only one thinking about moving the festivities forward by a couple of days.
Nevertheless, the dinner turned out fine, and we were all stuffed.
But it makes me wonder: yes, Mother’s Day is a heavily commercialized day of observance that was created only in the last century in the US, but does every nation have a “Mother’s Day”, or merely a few? And if you happen to live in a country without a formal Mother’s Day, do you merely adopt another’s? I would imagine that shopkeepers and vendors worldwide would love to have an angle for Mother’s Day, but how do they manage it?
Things that make you go, “Hmm…” 
