As in 2012, I thought I would analyze Mother’s Day
this year through the lens of the Sunday comics. And what a difference two years makes!
For one thing, two years ago I looked at all 20 comics
printed in the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette. This year I looked at a semi-random 30 comics of the total of
more than 70 on the Yahoo! Comics web page; those 30 included most of the 20 I
remembered from the Post-Gazette.
Judging from the results of the two surveys, Mother’s Day is
not as important as it used to be. Two years ago, 50% of all comics had a
Mother’s Day theme. This year, it was
down to one-third. Even family-centered comic strips such as “Momma,” “Fox
Trot” and “Family Tree” avoided the holiday.
In analyzing the topics of Mother’s Day comics two years
ago, I found that half of them—or 25% of all cartoons that day—focused on
bringing mother breakfast in bed. I concluded that breakfast in bed had become
the standard practice for this manufactured holiday. Perhaps it was just a fad,
because this year, not a single strip I saw depicted other family members
preparing and serving mother bed in breakfast.
The interesting thing about breakfast in bed is that the act
of preparation and serving doesn’t involved extra consumer purchases (since
breakfast typically consists of foods always in the frig). This lack of consumerism made Mother’s Day unlike
other holidays, which tend to reduce to buying and giving gifts.
While the breakfast in bed is missing from this year’s
comics, so is consumerism for the most part. True, “Arlo & Janis” creates
an emotional competition between the husband giving jewelry and a phone call
from a far away son. The “Peanuts” rerun details the act of selecting a card,
part of the buying process.
But most of the strips focus on serving, words of
appreciation and things one can make or do to show mother the love:
·
Doing chores for mom (“B.C.”)
·
Giving flowers (“Luann”)
·
Gathering flowers and making a card (“Nancy”)
·
Mom reversing roles and doing everything for the
child (“Cathy”)
·
Mom getting drunk at a multi-family barbecue
(“Stone Soup”)
·
The magic mirror on the wall calling mother the fairest
of them all (“Wizard of Id”)
·
How we love mom’s nagging (“Drabble”)
·
Mother and daughter spending the day together,
bicycling on the street (“Jump Start”)
Note that the food service takes place at home—in the
kitchen or backyard. No restaurants.
So even as comic strip moms are denied the pleasure of
breakfast in bed, their families are nonetheless giving more of themselves in a
direct way and depending less on engaging in commercial transactions as the
means to celebrate the holiday and
express their emotions.
This turn to the
virtues of interaction and investment of self that we see in comics may or may
not reflect a change in society. Depending on which report you read,
Mother’s Day spending will be either up or down this year in the aggregate. Per
capita spending will go down by $5. Yet even at the low end, Americans will
spend more on Mother’s Day than any other holiday but Christmas. But they spend
on very few things: one study reports that people mostly give their moms traditional gifts
of a card (81.3 percent), flowers (66.6 percent) or a nice meal out (56.5
percent). The first two predominate in the cartoon world.
Mother’s Day has thus not been privatized into a holiday that exists
only within families. It still finds expression in the economic realm. People
still interact with the rest of the world in the planning and implementation of
holiday plans, and they interact the way they know best—by making a purchase
that represents an emotion.
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