Womens Thoughts

Mothers Day Cake

Wild Flowers

Simnel Cake

Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday, 18th March 2012,  as it is officially known is on the fourth Sunday of Lent in the UK. The date alters dependent on Easter.

Most Sundays in the year, churchgoers would worship at their nearest parish or "daughter church".
However, it was considered important to return to your home church or nearest main church “mother church” once a year.

From as far back as the seventeenth century in England, families gathered for a mid-Lenten feast.  All the strict rules about fasting and penance were put aside and the Mother was a special guest.
Older children, particularly those working as domestic servants, or as apprentices, were given the day off to visit their mother and family, often taking a gift of a simnel cake to their mothers from their employers.

‘I’ll to thee a Simnell bring
‘Gainst thou go’st a mothering,
So that, when she blesseth thee,
Half that blessing thou’lt give to me.’

Robert Herrick 1648

Or a bunch of flowers picked from the hedgerows. The Simnel cake was made to mark the fourth Sunday in Lent and very much like a

Christmas cake, the Simnel cake is covered with pale sweet almond paste. The decoration is plain - eleven little balls of smooth paste which represent the apostles (omitting Judas).


Other countries celebrate Mothers Day on different dates, dependent to their culture.

In the USA, it was not until 1914 that President Woodrow Wilson, declared that Mother's Day should be celebrated as a national holiday on the second Sunday in May.  Albeit to Anna Jarvis, who devoted her entire life to the struggle to have Mothers Day declared a national holiday.

It was her mother Mrs Jarvis who had held an annual gathering, Mother's Freindship Day, to heal the pain of the Civil War, and after she died in 1905, Anna campaigned for the establishment of an official Mother's Day to commemorate her mother.

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