Mother's Day
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85 free Mother's Day trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
19 free Mother's Day trivia questions with answers. Mother's Day trivia lives in two places on BrainPickle. This page is the shorter set; the main quiz is Mother's Day trivia, with our deepest question pool on the topic and a source behind every answer.
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Q 01Which Philadelphia merchant helped Anna Jarvis launch Mother's Day with a 1908 store ceremony?
John Wanamaker
John Wanamaker gave Jarvis financial backing and his store auditorium, where she spoke to a reported 15,000 people instead of attending the first church service in her hometown.
Q 02The 1914 proclamation that made Mother's Day an official American holiday asked citizens to display what?
The national flag
The national flag: Congress asked for it on government buildings and homes as 'a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country', and the proclamation followed a day later.
Q 03Which U.S. President signed the proclamation officially designating Mother's Day as a national holiday?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson signed it on 9 May 1914, a day after Congress asked him to; Anna Jarvis's letter-writing campaign had already persuaded nearly every state to keep the day.
Q 04Which flower, her mother's favourite, did Anna Jarvis make the Mother's Day emblem?
Carnation
Carnation: Ann Reeves Jarvis loved the white bloom, so Anna sent hundreds to the first service; later a coloured one came to mean a living mother and a white one a mother who had died.
Q 05Which Mother's Day gift did Anna Jarvis say 'means nothing except that you are too lazy to write' to your mother?
A printed card
A printed card, Jarvis said, was no substitute for a letter in your own hand, and she spent most of her money suing firms that profited from her holiday.
Q 06What was Mother's Day founder Anna Jarvis's own experience of motherhood?
She never had children
She never had children: Jarvis stayed unmarried all her life and came to the holiday as a daughter, founding it to honour her own mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis.
Q 07Which Appalachian state was the first to make Mother's Day an official holiday, in 1910?
West Virginia
West Virginia was Anna Jarvis's home state and made the day official two years after her first service there; within about five years nearly every state was keeping it.
Q 08After founding Mother's Day, what did Anna Jarvis spend her final years campaigning to do?
Abolish the holiday
Abolish the holiday: sickened by its commercialisation, Jarvis was organising a petition in 1943 to have Mother's Day rescinded when she was placed in a sanitarium, where she died in 1948.
Q 09Which country's 21 March Mother's Day, championed by newspaper editor Mustafa Amin, was later copied across the Arab world?
Egypt
Egypt took up the day in the 1950s after Amin and his twin brother Ali, both newspaper publishers, championed it; he was later jailed for nine years as an alleged American spy.
Q 10Who plays divorced mother Sandy opposite Julia Roberts and Kate Hudson in the 2016 comedy 'Mother's Day'?
Jennifer Aniston
Jennifer Aniston plays Sandy, who is still adjusting to her ex-husband's marriage to a much younger woman when she meets a widowed former Marine in the supermarket.
Q 11In the United States, Mother's Day holds what distinction among all days of the year?
Most popular day to dine out
Most popular day to dine out: the National Restaurant Association's surveys have long ranked it first, a fate that would have appalled founder Anna Jarvis, who fought to keep the day free of commerce.
Q 12Before Anna Jarvis's efforts, which activist tried to establish a 'Mother's Day for Peace' in the 1870s?
Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe had written 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' in the early 1860s; the bloodshed she had seen since turned her against war, and in the 1870s she urged mothers to gather each June for peace.
Q 13Thailand's Mother's Day, 12 August, is the birthday of which royal?
Q 21In Mexico, it is traditional to open Mother's Day celebrations with which song?
Las Mañanitas
Las Mañanitas is Mexico's traditional birthday song, so mothers get the full birthday serenade, sung a cappella or by a hired mariachi or trio.
Q 22Panama celebrates Mother's Day on 8 December, the same day as which Catholic feast?
The Immaculate Conception
The Immaculate Conception: Panama first tried a May date in 1924, then in 1930 moved the day to the Marian feast on 8 December after an appeal made through the president's wife.
Q 23Indonesia's Hari Ibu on 22 December marks the anniversary of what 1928 event?
The first Indonesian Women Congress
Sirikit
Sirikit, queen consort to King Bhumibol from 1950, was born on 12 August 1932; Thailand keeps her birthday as a national holiday for mothers, just as the late king's birthday honours fathers.
Q 14Britain's Mothering Sunday changes date every year because it is counted back from which festival?
Easter
Easter: Mothering Sunday is a Sunday in the middle of Lent, the fast that leads up to Easter, so it moves with it each spring instead of staying in May like the American holiday.
Q 15Which country celebrates Mother's Day in its spring, on the third Sunday of October?
Argentina
Argentina once kept the day on 11 October, the old Catholic feast of the Maternity of Mary; when the Church moved that feast to 1 January, Argentines stayed with October.
Q 16What did Ann Reeves Jarvis's 'Mothers' Day Work Clubs' focus on in the 1850s?
Public health and sanitation
Ann Reeves Jarvis founded the Mothers' Day Work Clubs in 1858 to improve public health and sanitation in Taylor County, teaching hygiene to fight the area's high infant mortality; she died in 1905.
Q 17Ann Jarvis is said to have staged an 1868 'Mothers' Friendship Day' to reconcile neighbours divided by what?
The Civil War
The Civil War had split her county, and Jarvis had kept her Mothers' Day Work Clubs neutral, nursing Union and Confederate soldiers alike, before the reunion brought veterans of the two armies together.
Q 18Which country's Mother's Day, 27 May, honours the women who died defending Cochabamba from Spanish troops in 1812?
Bolivia
Bolivia remembers the Heroínas de la Coronilla, the women who took up arms on San Sebastián hill when royalist troops stormed the city, and were cut down there.
Q 19Because it is autumn there in May, which flower is the traditional Mother's Day bloom in Australia?
Chrysanthemums
Chrysanthemums are naturally in season in the Australian autumn; the day itself took off there in the 1920s, after a Sydney woman began collecting gifts for lonely mothers in a state hospital.
Q 20Mexico's Día de las Madres is held on which fixed date every year?
10 May
10 May took hold after a 1922 campaign by Rafael Alducin's newspaper Excélsior, backed by education minister José Vasconcelos, and unlike the American holiday it never shifts to a Sunday.
The first Indonesian Women Congress opened in Yogyakarta on 22 December 1928 and pressed for better terms for women in marriage and for girls' education; its opening day later became Hari Ibu.
Q 24Sweden celebrates Mother's Day on which day of the year?
Last Sunday in May
Sweden has marked Mother's Day on the last Sunday in May since 1919, when the author Cecilia Bååth-Holmberg introduced the idea from abroad.
Q 25In 1931 a Japanese women's league set Mother's Day on the birthday of which figure?
The reigning empress
The reigning empress: Kōjun, wife of Emperor Hirohito, was born on 6 March; the American-style May Sunday replaced the date after the war.
Q 26Which country's Dzień Matki falls on 26 May every year, whatever the day of the week?
Poland
Poland keeps Dzień Matki on a fixed calendar date, so it lands midweek most years instead of on the May Sunday that most of Europe uses.
Q 27Nepal's Mata Tirtha Aunsi, tied to a legend about a sacred pond, is popularly known by what name?
Day to see mother's face
Day to see mother's face: in legend a son saw his dead mother's face in the pond at Mata Tirtha, and the bereaved still go there hoping to see theirs.
Q 28Rather than a separate Mother's Day, South Korea marks which holiday on 8 May?
Parents' Day
Parents' Day replaced South Korea's 8 May Mother's Day in 1973 so that fathers were honoured too; Children's Day falls three days earlier, on 5 May.
Q 29Which organization did Anna Jarvis create in 1912 to police the holiday she founded?
Mother's Day International Association
Anna Jarvis incorporated the Mother's Day International Association in 1912, the same year she trademarked 'Mother's Day' and 'second Sunday in May', to defend the holiday's name against merchants and copycats.
Q 30Which painting appeared on the 1934 US postage stamp issued 'in memory and in honor of the mothers of America'?
Whistler's Mother
Whistler's Mother: the Post Office engraved a detail of the 1871 portrait, long an American icon of motherhood, although the painter had titled it an 'Arrangement in Grey and Black'.