Mother’s Day in the Los Angeles area Sunday will include tributes to foster parents and mothers in senior citizen housing while Major League Baseball will dedicate all its games to the fight against breast cancer.
Organizers expect more than 2,000 youth and their families to attend the eighth annual Mother’s Day celebration at the Willows Community School in Culver City.
Guests will get their hair styled, receive makeup and a buffet lunch. The event will also include a carnival, storytelling and other activities for children.
“There is no one more deserving of recognition and our gratitude than the many Los Angeles County foster mothers and fathers who care for our most vulnerable children,” said Philip Browning, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Child and Family Services.
The event is organized by Foster Care Counts, a nonprofit organization which supports foster youth and the agencies that serve them.
What organizers are billing as the “largest Mother’s Day celebration in the world” will be held at the Los Angeles Jewish Home in Reseda, honoring mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers.
For the 11th consecutive year Major League Baseball will dedicate Mother’s Day to the fight against breast cancer. For the first time, all teams will wear specially designed uniforms for Mother’s Day.
The Angels will wear their home white jerseys with the lettering on the chest and numbers in pink for the game against the Tampa Bay Rays at Angel Stadium. Their caps will have a pink Angels logo.
Royalties for the sales of Mother’s Day jerseys and caps will be donated by Major League Baseball to Susan G. Komen, which describes itself as the world’s largest nonprofit source of funding for the fight against breast cancer.
All players and other on-field personnel in all of today’s games will wear symbolic pink ribbons on their uniforms. Commemorative base jewels and dugout lineup cards will also be pink. The Mother’s Day games will be played using baseballs with pink stitching for the fourth consecutive year.
Many players will use pink bats and pink Louisville Slugger bats will be stamped with the MLB breast cancer awareness logo.
Many game-used Louisville Slugger pink bats and other pink items from Mother’s Day games will be auctioned on Major League Baseball’s website, MLB.com, with proceeds helping to fight breast cancer.
(Major League Baseball will again devote Father’s Day to the fight against prostate cancer, including teams wearing special Father’s Day jerseys and caps with light blue incorporated into the logos for the first time.)
Patricia Raburn of Orange will be the Angels honorary bat girl today. She is completing an aggressive round of chemotherapy to battle breast cancer diagnosed late in 2015, but is continuing to volunteer at Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
In his Mother’s Day proclamation, President Barack Obama wrote, “On Mother’s Day, we celebrate those who are the first to welcome us into the world. Performing the most important work there is, mothers — biological, foster, or adoptive — are our first role models and earliest motivators.
“They balance enormous responsibilities and shape who we become as adults, their lessons guiding us throughout life. Regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or marital status, mothers have always moved our nation forward and remained steadfast in their pursuit of a better and brighter future for their children.”
Mother’s Day was initially proposed in 1870 by activist-poet Julia Ward Howe as a call for peace and disarmament. It was celebrated in 18 cities in 1873, continued for about another 10 years in Boston under Howe’s backing, then died out.
The second attempt to establish Mother’s Day began on May 9, 1907, the second anniversary of the death of Anna Jarvis’ mother Ann. She invited several friends to her home in Philadelphia in commemoration of her mother’s life, which included providing nursing care and promoting better sanitation during the Civil War, helping save lives on both sides.
Jarvis announced to her friends her idea of a day of national celebration in honor of mothers, which was first celebrated on May 10, 1908 at the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia where Ann Jarvis worshipped. The church is now known as the International Mother’s Day Shrine.
West Virginia Gov. William E. Glasscock issued the first Mother’s Day proclamation in 1910. By 1911, it was celebrated in nearly every state. President Woodrow Wilson signed a congressional joint resolution in 1914 designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day nationally.
—Staff and wire reports