Bring on
the boar-leg celebrations
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
MOTHER’S Day has a proud and noble history, generally entailing
household appliances of varying speeds and slicing ability.
However, it did not begin, as many people seem to think, either in
an Amway brainstorming session or when Philadelphian woman Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother in 1907. True, the former event was rumored to have sparked the invention of aspirin, and the latter event did inspire then American president Woodrow Wilson (no relation to Simon Townsend) to create a national holiday, in 1914, honoring mothers.
But a little-known fact is that the Mother’s Day origins were in the
Middle Ages in England. There, trades apprentices were given a day off to go home to visit their mothers. However, being the Middle Ages, the lads merely headed to the local tavern where they sang loud drinking songs while waving boar legs at each other before finally reeling home, hoping their mums wouldn’t notice the blood on their straw door mats.
This tradition lasted as long as it took for card companies to realise there was money to be had in boar-leg celebrations for mothers. Thus the greeting card industry was born.
The very first card was believed to have read: Goodly woman, Ye raised me right, sewed me undershirts nice, Ye is better to covet, than a boar in me gullet.
It was a short jump from there to Mother’s Day today which, as we
all know, is represented primarily by tiny fire-red lingerie from dads and auto-cleaning steam irons with spray squirters.
This raises some obvious questions: why don’t Mother’s Day cards
read as nattily as they did in the Middle Ages? (It’s a mystery.)
And, what does one get the mum who already owns uncomfortable
lingerie and a squirty iron?
Well, ideally, all appliances are out, especially ones that look
suspiciously like cordless drills (unless she’s in the building trade). Dads
should buy wives a drill only if they want the complete Danielle Steele book set for Father’s Day.
One thing which might brighten a mum’s day is a nice lie-in, followed (three minutes later), by the adorable screamers that sprang from her womb setting off the smoke alarms with breakfast treats charcoaled and true.
See, that’s a real Mother’s Day surprise: which unexplored food
groups can be transformed into edible black and served with toothy sideways grins?
I, myself, once delighted my mother (well, her actual emotion was
something more indeterminate) with charcoaled marshmallows on toast. They were an eerily close apparition of molten bitumen. (And tasted only
marginally better.)
But it was a labor of love. Which brings me to the point
about Mother’s Day. Think about this: which says “I love you’’ more?
Familial slaves bearing chocolate? Or a cordless drill with 48 attachments?
HANDY HINT: Cordless drills weigh an awful lot when airborne.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 09 MAY 2000