Inflatable Mother’s Day Flowers in Brooklyn

The 2026 edition of Mother’s Day falls on May 10, six days from today (with “today” being May 4, 2026, the date of publication of the instant article). Back in 2021, I published a research article on Anna Jarvis and the early twentieth-century origins of Mother’s Day, with links to contemporaneous newspaper articles and reports documenting the ultimately successful Mother’s Day movement. I humbly recommend it as Mother’s Day-week reading, both for the history and for recalling the original concept behind the occasion. But while I had published a lengthy Mother’s Day history article, I had not yet covered Mother’s Day holiday decorations — a sad short-coming given how many Brooklyn holiday decorations I have documented in these pages. One reason for this hole in our archive was that few people where I typicall walk in Brooklyn put out Mother’s Day decorations. But there is another reason that I cannot so easily explain away. On May 5, 2025, I photographed an inflatable Mother’s Day…