How Gen Z and Millennials Are Changing Mother's Day Gifting

In the spirit of gift giving this Mother’s Day, here’s a memorable reflection on the holiday from the pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1944: “Mother’s Day is being desecrated. The telegraph companies with their ready-made greetings, the florists with their high-pressure campaigns and awful prices, and the candy manufacturers have made a racket out of my ideas.” The speaker? Anna Jarvis, founder of Mother’s Day. We’ll get to Jarvis’ story in a second but, for the moment, it’s hard not to grant her point: Mother’s Day is indeed a highly commercialized holiday. This year, Americans will spend nearly $36 billion on gifts, a $4 billion increase over 2022, according to the National Retail Federation. Jarvis was also on the mark about the companies that profit. Florists will book about $2.9 billion, according to the NRF, and vendors (everyone from pharmacy chains to Etsy) will sell about 113 million greeting cards, according to the Greeting Card Association. But while numbers like these might suggest that Mother's Day is the same old habit of shipping off the same old gifts, Americans are in fact changing the way they celebrate the holiday—perhaps even in a way that would make Jarvis happy. Thanks in part to years of cooped-up pandemic living, 57% of respondents to an NRF survey said they would take their mother on a “special outing” this year. “We are seeing an uptick in outings such as dinner or brunch,” confirmed NRF senior director of industry and consumer insights Katherine Cullen. “[These] could be everything from tickets to an event to a cooking class. It could be a hike, if folks are looking to do something inexpensive and just spend time together.” And spending time with mom, it turns out, had been the point of Mother’s Day nearly from the start. Ann Reeves Jarvis was a Sunday school teacher in Appalachia, determined to lower infant mortality rates with Mother’s Day Work Clubs that promoted better domestic hygiene. After the Civil War (in which Jarvis refused to take a side), she broadened her work to include Mother’s Friendship Day as a way of healing the rifts between the North and South. When Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter Anna Jarvis took up the cause of honoring mothers with a designated day. Finally, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday in May as “a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” Anna Jarvis, as we’ve seen, eventually denounced Mother’s Day for becoming too commercial. She believed that Americans should spend the day with their mothers and, if that was impossible, then they should write them letters. We’re unlikely to see a return to pen and ink, but Americans do still resort to the next best thing: Mother’s Day sees a 37% spike in phone calls, according to History.com, making it the busiest calling day of the year. The Y and Z Effect Consumer research firm Collage Group recently completed a study that found that Gen Z and millennials celebrate Mother’s Day at higher rates (89% and 88%, respectively) than Gen X and boomers. These statistics don’t surprise Jack Mackinnon, senior director of cultural insights at consumer intelligence firm Collage Group, who points out that younger Americans—searching for opportunities to start their careers—have little choice but to move to large metro areas that are farther away from their mothers. The difficulty of seeing mom, therefore, makes them more likely to buy her gifts. Much in keeping with the NRF’s findings, those gifts skew toward experiential ones. “It’s such a millennial trope because it’s true—there’s this feeling of not wanting to just check the box,” he said. Citing an inherent “resistance to clichéd gifts [like] flower, candy and cards,” Gen Z and millennial children figure “an experience might be more meaningful.” Keeping Mum Anna Jarvis (1) crusaded for Mother’s Day until its commercialization proved to be too much. Digital trends aside, flowers (2) and cards (3) still remain the most popular gifts—though other categories are gaining ground. While it’s easy to assume that Mother’s Day is as old as America itself, it’s only been an official holiday since President Woodrow Wilson (4) declared it one in 1914.

Perspective

How Gen Z and Millennials Are Changing the Mother's Day Gift List

Flowers and cards are nice, but experiences are really the thing to give moms

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara