SHAWVILLE, QUEBEC | Is Mothers Day a commercial invention? Does it exploit our strong feelings towards our mothers merely to sell gifts, flowers, meals, and cards?

Such questions roll around with every holiday, and any answers depend upon asking the question as if it concerns past history or today's social realities. Who can be sure of the motivation of the originators of the holiday -- and do we care what they thought they were doing?

The interesting point is about our present day, about how well our holidays reflect reality. We can make a commercial event out of almost everything. Even Earth Day will likely become a festival in which many people make money and sell products, whether or not the Earth benefits. Making money and buying things seem to be our major motivations, as pathetic as that sounds.

So the commercial angle is no big thing. We are bound to turn everything into a commercial opportunity. What's more interesting is to ask what these holidays reflect about us.

Holidays originated around religious, patriotic, or political heroes and events; holidays have an ideological side. Christmas and Easter reflected a Christian heritage; the Queen's Birthday reflects a monarchist stream, a political holiday, and St. Patrick's Day (for the Irish at least) reflected both religion and politics.

We need and enjoy holidays, celebrations, and festivals. They tie us together into a community; they affirm values that are common to almost all of us. But we are no longer the monolithic and homogenized society we once were.

There are groups among us practicing virtually every religion that exists, and there are political movements ranging from merging with the USA to efforts to create small self-governing communities; we have Christian anarchists and Marxist Leninists, and our parliament houses Quebec nationalists, social democrats, pacifists, Reform Party conservatives, right and left Liberals, Red Tories, and an Independent.

In our pluralistic society, holidays based on a single tradition divide us, not unite us as they originally did. The old celebrations fragment us into competing religious and political interests.

This isn't political correctness. It's that we are no longer a homogenous society and it is counter-productive to pretend that we are one, or to act as if we are a cohesive and tight society, even in Quebec. We need celebrations that reflect political and social realities, not correctness.

Mothers Day is a great example of this. Through it we celebrate what unites us all, not what fragments us. We all have mothers -- Christians, Muslims and humanists -- and it would be a weird religion that did not respect and love its mothers. Hence the value and importance of Mothers Day.

The same holds true for Fathers Day, Valentines Day (to honour lovers, not a Christian saint), and also for our political holidays such as Canada Day and the Fete Nationale that are unifying because we all share them.

It's great if local restaurants were busy on Mothers Day, but to see only commercialism in this is to see only a tiny part of the picture.

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Copyright © 2009 Fred Ryan/Log Cabin Chronicles/05.09