The woman who created Mothers Day also hated it with a passion and her family is upholding that tradition

Mother’s Day ain’t what it used to be.The family of Anna Jarvis, the holiday’s founder, are following in their ancestor’s footsteps — by refusing to recognize the controversial date.Jarvis, born in 1864, wanted moms to have a deeply personal day to celebrate them.Her vision for the holiday was to be a tribute to “the best mother who ever lived: yours.”But as the day started to become more commercialized, the woman from Webster, West Virginia, spent her final years, blind and broke, campaigning against the holiday with lawsuits to reclaim what the day initially stood for.Today, Richard Talbott Miller Jr.

and Elizabeth Burr, Jarvis’ first cousins three times removed, are upholding the activist’s stance against Mother’s Day, though they only recently discovered their link to Jarvis thanks to an intrepid geneologist from MyHeritage, who sought to find out if the holiday’s creator had any living kin.When Burr first received a call from a researcher at MyHeritage, she “thought it was a scam.”“But once I realized it was real, it was amazing.”Jarvis set out to establish Mother’s Day after the death of her own mother, whose dream it was to see such a holiday become a reality — so Jarvis honored hers by doing just that.And in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill making Jarvis’ Mother’s Day a national holiday.As the date transformed into a so-called “Hallmark holiday,” Jarvis couldn’t stand the monster she created — she hated the flower arrangements, greeting cards and expensive chocolates, CNN reported.She called those who profited from Mother’s Day “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites.”“This is the wrong spirit,” Jarvis told the Miami Daily News in a heated interview in 1924.Even though she spent years campaigning Congress to get the holiday national recognition, she started protesting florists for the marked-up and excessive floral arrangements, which eventually led to her arrest ...