Why not make it Mother's Year?

This is a tribute to moms. If you think I am late, let's just say the delay is intended to extend the holiday of Mother's Day. Their special day ought to be more like the 12 days of Christmas or even the month of Ramadan. One Sunday just doesn't cut it for all that mothers do.

The problem with a one-day celebration is that it has the same time commitment as Arbor Day or Presidents Day. Heaven forbid Tax Day is also 24 hours. Even pickles have more than a day. They have a whole week dedicated to them, and mothers are far sweeter than 1/7th of a wrinkled cucumber.

We should have at least a Mothers Week. It would start on the traditional second Sunday of May and continue throughout the whole seven days. There would be seven times the customary fancy brunch buffet. The Mothers Day meal is the best fixings hotels and restaurants offer all year. If it is only on Sunday, the diet or beliefs of some dissuade them having others work on the Sabbath, even though they do it 52 times a year themselves.

Extending the celebration six days beyond Sunday would permit recognizing a treasured maternal activity of serving leftovers. Waste not, want not. This extends to all the excess from the day-before culinary extravaganza. There would be cold prime roast sandwiches for school, exotic salads for lunch and warmed-up French toast for dinner. On Tuesday, there could be a school play depicting our nation's founding mothers; by Wednesday, the kids who procrastinated would have sufficient time to come up with a gift they passed by in the mall. With the stores open, they could purchase stuff not available if the boutiques had been closed on Sunday. With the weeklong approach, the moms could get together just by themselves on Thursday, Friday would be a special date-night and everyone could cheerfully do chores Saturday.

Instead of celebrating a whole week, the other possibility would be to have Mother's Day more than one single Sunday in May. For example, there are two days of the year that we devote to turning the clocks either forward or backward for Daylight Savings. Mothers work around the clock, so the Spring-forward would cut their workload by one hour in celebration. The Fall-back could be a free 60 minutes of putting up her feet to rest, starting at 2 a.m. We could acknowledge moms and check our fire alarms at the same time.