CHRISTINE: I’m Christine Cyr Clisset.
CAIRA: I’m Caira Blackwell.
ROSIE: I’m Rosie Guerin and you’re listening to The Wirecutter Show.
CAIRA: This episode is called: A Memorable Mother’s Day
ROSIE: Hey guys, special day coming up.
CAIRA: Oh, your birthday?
ROSIE: No, not yet. I’ll give you plenty of…
CHRISTINE: Are we doing an episode about your birthday, Rosie?
ROSIE: Yeah, we are. We will. No, it’s Mother’s Day.
CHRIS: Oh, yeah. Of course.
ROSIE: Mother’s day is Sunday, May 11th.
CHRISTINE: Well, I’m a mother and Rosie, you’re a mother.
ROSIE: I sure am.
CHRISTINE: Caira, you are the child of a mother, right?
CAIRA: And I’m giving mother all the time.
ROSIE: You are mother.
CAIRA: I’m a mother. No, I have a lovely mom. Her birthday is actually May 12th, so. Oh, nice. She likes to do the thing where we celebrate Mother’s Day and her birthday
separately every year.
CHRISTINE: Well, that is a little bit like having your birthday right before Christmas or after Christmas. Exactly, yeah. I don’t do big Mother’s Day things. My biggest ask is that my kids let me sleep in.
ROSIE: I think that’s probably very common. I don’t know, there’s something about Mother’s Day, being in the spring, the weather’s warming up. It’s always been for me a nice time to sort of take a pause and take stock and write my mom a nice card and maybe give her some flowers and just be together and have a moment.
CHRISTINE: That’s very sweet. You know, I think when I was a fresh mother, like a fresh young mother, I used to have higher expectations for Mother’s Day. Like, I wanted to have the Mother’s day brunch and I wanted it to be sort of like really special. And I feel like I, after trying to go to Mother’s date brunch a few times in a row when my kids were really little, I realized what a horrible experience that is.
ROSIE: Yeah, I’m not trying to to go Mother’s day brunch. I just, I too would love to sleep in, but there are two moms in our house and so we cancel each other out and we both have to get up.
CAIRA: So when they get older, each kid will pick a mom.
ROSIE: To pamper? I’d like that. I’ll plant that seed. Yeah, no, but Mother’s Day can be a little bit tricky too. It can be fraught. Folks who don’t have mothers, don’t have mother figures, have lost mothers, have lost mother figures. It’s not always a cut and dried big celebration, let’s go to brunch moment for people. So I think that’s sort of important to acknowledge as well.
CHRISTINE: And you know, I think it’s also important to acknowledge that not everybody’s gonna wanna do Mother’s Day in the same way and different people have different expectations. But we do have a lot of mothers that we work with and people with mothers that work with. And so we asked some of our friends in the Wirecutter newsroom to send us some messages about memorable Mother’s day gifts or expressions that they have given to the mothers in their lives. Because Mother’s Day doesn’t really need to be something that you buy someone necessarily. Oftentimes I’ve found that some of the best memories I have are things that my kids made for me or my husband sent me to a hotel overnight by myself. That was maybe the best Mother’s day gift.
ROSIE: I yearn to be sent to a hotel or on a business trip.
CAIRA: Yeah, some people told us about the gifts that they’ve given or the gifts that they received as mothers and others were called some handmade items or cards that really meant a lot to them.
ROSIE: Moms and mother figures contain multitudes, which means expressions of love on that day can contain multitudes as well.
CAIRA: After the break, we’ll hear about some memorable Mother’s Day gifts from our colleagues. Be right back.
CHRISTINE: And we’re back. We are going to get into some fun reflections, memories from our Wirecutter colleagues about Mother’s Day. Shall we take a listen?
CAIRA: Yeah, let’s do it.
ROSIE: Let’s get into it.
NANCY: Hi, I’m Nancy Redd, senior staff writer at Wirecutter. In 2010, my beloved mommy went through a very yummy nighttime pancake phase. Every night before bed, she had to cook up a single perfect pancake for herself. So Mother’s Day that year, my husband and I sent her a very, very fancy, premium quality jug of maple syrup. And we included a note that said, something sweet for the sweetest mommy in the whole wide world. Happy Mother’s day. Needless to say she loved it!
MARILYN: Hi, I’m Marilyn. I’m the senior editor on Wirecutter’s Kitchen Team. So I became a mom for the first time exactly one week before Mother’s Day, way back in 2013. And anyone who’s been through that metamorphosis can probably understand that week was a haze of pain, exhaustion, and worry. I had a rough recovery and I was all around just shell shocked. Like could not believe this is what moms go through. So a week passes and it’s time to celebrate Mother’s Day. We were living with my parents at the time. So I had the privilege of celebrating alongside my own mom, who I suddenly appreciated a whole lot more now that I had a better understanding of what she went through. My husband and my brother made us brunch. I can’t remember what we ate or anything. All I can remember is walking out and seeing a huge bouquet of flowers on the table. And it made me wanna cry. It was like air for my soul. I hadn’t been outside much. I was probably depressed, definitely anxious. And I don’t know, the sight of those flowers just gave me this little burst of hope that I really needed. It probably sounds a little over dramatic, but yeah, flowers, I guess they’re a classic for a reason.
CAROLINE: Hi, I’m Caroline Mullen. I’m a staff writer at Wirecutter focused on cleaning and organizing. And for Mother’s Day last year, we took my mom to see some giraffes at the Bronx Zoo. They do a meet and greet where you can feed them and take pictures up close. My mom is a huge fan of giraffes and really wants to go to that hotel in Africa where you see them outside of your bedroom. And so this was the next best thing. And she loved it and we got some great photos out of it.
HARRY: Hi, this is Harry Sawyers. I’m a senior editor at Wirecutter, and I’m telling a story about the mother’s day when I surprised my wife, the mother of our three kids, with a truly impressive hairdryer. Okay, so my wife Hyanne had an old Wirecutters pick hairdryers, and she hated it. I think it was a Conair. And for years, she was always like, I hate your pick. And she’d heard about the Dyson hairdry. She had her hair styled with a Dyson hair dryer. She knew it was great, and knew she wanted one, but she didn’t want to spend $429 on it. So meanwhile, there’s this recent wire cutter deals event and I’m seeing all these deals on these refurbished Dyson vacuums. And I’m like, hmm, a refurb, because that sells for like $250. And you should know my wife likes nice things, but she is constitutionally opposed to paying full price. So this was pretty easy to justify to myself. So I bought it. Few days later, box arrives, and it’s literally just a box. There’s no original packaging, but I open it up, look it over, check that it works, make sure it’s clean. I’m, like, okay, we’re all set. I gotta wrap this thing before Mother’s Day, and so I hide it in the garage. Few days later, it’s almost Mother’s day, she gets out of the shower one night and I hear her fumbling with the old hair dryer in the drawer, she’s untangling the cord, like swearing at it, and I call out, are you gonna dry your hair now? Just hang on a minute, and run out to the garage where I stashed that still unwrapped box. And so I gotta bring it back inside, I try to quickly just conceal it while I plug it in, put it on a nozzle, and hand it to her, like voila, and she goes, oh, you got me the hair dryer, and I said… Yeah, and even better… it’s Refurb!
ANNEMARIE: Hi, I’m Annemarie Conte. I’m the deputy editor at Wirecutter. And I don’t know, I don’t love Mother’s Day. I think there are a lot of expectations around the holiday and it can get really complicated, especially if you have kids and a spouse and there are still grandparents in the picture. So it’s wonderful, but it can just be a lot. But I do find as the years go by that I’m getting more and more nostalgic for those early preschool years when the kids would come home. With a craft that they made, and it would be like a framed photo of their chubby little face, and then there would be a bad poem or a terrible pun, and it’d be like, you’ll never let go of me, or I’ll never lego of you, and then it’s a bunch of lego, or you’ll always have a piece of my heart, and there’s a punch of puzzle pieces glued to it. Thank you early education teachers for this. We love you, we appreciate you, and what a wonderful little keepsake to have of that moment in time.
MARGUERITE: Hi, this is Marguerite Preston. I’m an editorial director at Wirecutter. One of the most memorable Mother’s Day gifts that I’ve ever gotten is actually a pretty classic one. It’s a box of chocolates, specifically it’s the Recuity Black Box, which is a box of chocolates that we have recommended on our guide to the best boxed chocolates for many, many years. I got it on my first Mother’s Day and my mom was the one who gave it to me. And what made it memorable was that, this was a box of chocolates that I had tasted as an editor of our kitchen coverage, I had sent to my mom because I loved it. And so when she sent it to me, she sent with a note saying basically how much she had loved getting it from me and how excited she was to give it back to me for my first Mother’s Day. So that was really special. And on top of that, it was a really delicious, incredible box of chocolates.
HANNAH: Hi, I’m Hannah Morrill, and I’m an editor on the gifts team. And I am here to share my shame about a Mother’s Day gift that I got that I didn’t like. I think it was the first year that my daughter was born, and maybe I had been a mom for about a year, and my partner got me a framed photograph of the two of us, a kind of blown up photograph of the 2 of us. And I looked awful in that photograph, and I really kind of threw a fit about that and was like, why would you get that? In retrospect, I realized that that was not my greatest move, but… I do think there’s some takeaway here, which is that it is a beautiful gift to give someone a framed photograph of themselves and their child, but that because it’s something that’s going to last for a long time, it might want to be a photograph that the person themselves has approved of. I think my daughter looks really cute in the photograph that now hangs in our bedroom when I see every day, but I think that I have Looked better. So that is a little hot tip. Happy Mother’s Day!
SAMANTHA: This is Samantha Shoech, I’m a staff writer on the Gifts team. For Mother’s Day, I like to give and receive plants for the garden. My mother and I are both gardeners and May in California is just a crazy in bloom fertile time and anyone who gardens is out in the dirt. And so that’s what we both want. Both my kids have tree names. So I think. The most memorable gifts for me have been an olive tree and a magnolia tree. Both are still flourishing. I wish I could say the same for my fig tree, but sadly he fell to the gophers last year. So maybe this Mother’s Day I’ll get a replacement fig. Hint hint.
CAIRA: That was really sweet.
CHRISTINE: So many sweet gifts in that group. I love that.
ROSIE: One of the things I liked best was the thread that seemed to run through all of those responses. This intergenerational love and conversation, grandparent, parent, kid. It’s just like a nice moment, Mother’s Day, to celebrate those bonds.
CHRISTINE: Definitely. It also reminded me of that feeling of being a new mom. Like I kind of forget the sympathy I should have or the empathy I should have for new moms because you kind of, I think you forget how that felt. But I do think if you have any new moms in your life, they might not be feeling awesome.
ROSIE: Yeah, Marilyn spoke beautifully about that.
CHRISTINE: It can be really intense, that first year of having a kid, and even Hannah’s mention about not feeling great in the photo. I think the common thing that happens as a mom is you’re so focused, and this can happen for dads too, but you’re focused on taking care of these people that you’re not thinking about what you look like in photos, and so oftentimes moms don’t get taken, they’re not in the photos. Yeah. And then sometimes they don’t look their best. So that’s, I think that was a good reminder that, you know, I look back at those years And I’m like. Where was I? Was I even in the photos?
ROSIE: Well, and that she received this beautiful, simple bouquet of flowers and that was incredibly moving, that that was enough.
CAIRA: That was my biggest takeaway as the person who’s often struggling to find what feels like an impossibly original gift every single year. Sometimes the things that we think of as cliche are cliche for a reason. Like a beautiful bouquet of flowers really can go a long way and I loved hearing that from Marilyn.
CHRISTINE: Or chocolates, like a really nice box of chocolates with a nice card.
ROSIE: Like, you don’t have to over-complicate it. I kind of loved, I have to say, for those who are going to swing for the fence or attempt to swing the fence, Carolyn taking her mom to the Bronx Zoo, come on. I want to do that.
CHRISTINE: That was great.
ROSIE: In place of taking her to the giraffe manor in Nairobi. Oh, yeah. I love it.
CHRISTINE: Yeah, that was very, very sweet.
ROSIE: Sweet gesture.
CHRISTINE: And if listeners are looking for some ideas, we do have a lot of great Mother’s Day gift ideas on our site. Our gift team curates a lot specific Mother’s day gifts, but we also have guides to flower delivery service in case you’re looking for a last minute flower delivery. We have a guide to box chocolates. I think a great gift is also food delivery. We have these specialty food boxes, which are lovely. You can get all sorts of different things delivered. So if you’re looking for ideas, definitely check out Wirecutter’s gift section.
ROSIE: That’s right. And that’s it for us. Hope you find a wonderful, meaningful way to celebrate Mother’s Day this year, whatever that looks like for you. Happy Mother’s day.
CAIRA: Happy Mother’s Day! Love you mom.
