Did you know that the woman most responsible for Mother's Day HATED it so much that she was JAILED for her furious protests? Read the remarkable story below. Then send your mother a tacky post card to show you care.

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On May 12, 1907, a Philadelphia school teacher named Anna M. Jarvis held a small ceremony in honor of her mother who had died two years before. Soon afterward, incensed at what she saw as widespread neglect of parents by adult children, she began a campaign to create a national holiday. Her seven-year campaign bore fruit in 1914 when President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May a national holiday, to be called Mother's Day.

Anna's joy soon turned to disgust as florists and greeting card merchants began aggressively promoting the new holiday to increase sales. She watched in horror as her initial vision of the holiday was lost in an orgy of crass commercialism.

"I wanted Mother's Day to be a day of sentiment, not of profit," Anna said. Bitter and enraged, she spent the rest of her life in futile efforts to have the act repealed. She lobbied, wrote thousands of letters to public officials, and filed lawsuits to stop Mother's Day celebrations. By 1923, having spent all the money she had, Anna stepped up her campaign with more aggressive methods, culminating in her arrest and imprisonment for disturbing the peace at a Mother's Day convention. Defeated and impoverished, Anna lost her home and spent her final years in a sanitarium, largely supported by charitable contributions from grateful florists.

Anna Jarvis never married, and never became a mother herself. Shortly before her death in 1948 she confided to a reporter that she was sorry she had ever conceived the idea of Mother's Day.

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