What hymns are sung around Mother’s Day?

Mother’s Day is approaching. In our church, we place a lot of value on Mother’s Day. Primary kids usually sing a song or two in sacrament meeting to their mothers and this used to be one of only two days during which missionaries could call home. Let’s see what hymns are sung on Mother’s Day. In this post, I’ll only focus on data from the United States and Canada since they’re the two countries with the most amount of data that also celebrate it on the second Sunday in May. This amounts to 328 sacrament meetings from 184 wards.

If you look in the Topics index at the back of the hymnal, you’ll see five songs listed under the “Motherhood” entry: From Homes of Saints Glad Songs Arise (#297), Home Can Be a Heaven on Earth (#298), Love at Home (#294), O My Father (#292), and Teach Me to Walk in the Light (#304). You’ll also be redirected to the “Family” and “Marriage” entries, both of which contain no hymns of their own but redirect you again to “Children”, “Fatherhood”, and “Home.” We’ll skip the “Fatherhood” songs for now and just focus on the “Motherhood,” “Children,” and “Home” categories.

This figure shows the hymns in these categories and how they intersect. Note that all the Motherhood hymns are also listed under the “Home” category. If you’re like me, you might not even recognize some of the Home hymns. Five of them (The Lord Be with Us (#161), Our Mountain Home So Dear (#33), Up, Awake, Ye Defenders of Zion (#248), Father, Cheer Our Souls Tonight (#231), and The Wintry Day, Descending to Its Close (#37)) are sung less than once a decade on average per ward, so they’re not likely to show up as Mother’s Day hymns.

So, those hymns are supposedly the ones we would be most likely to draw from. Let’s see what hymns are actually sung. Figure Figure 1 shows the most popular hymns sung on Mother’s Day, excluding sacrament hymns.

Figure 1: Most popular hymns sung on Mother's Day (sacrament hymns excluded)

The most popular Mother’s Day hymn is Love at Home (#294), with about 36% of wards singing it each year. The next most popular was Home Can Be a Heaven on Earth (#298), Teach Me to Walk in the the Light (#304), and O My Father (#292). All four of these, are part of the “Motherhood” category of hymns in the index. The last of the five in that category is From Home of Saints Glad Songs Arise (#297) and while less than one in 20 wards sing it each year, it’s still in 7th place for most popular hymn on Mother’s Day.

The next most popular category of hymns on Mother’s Day was the “Home” category. As mentioned above, some of the hymns in that category are rather infrequent, but others are pretty popular, including Families Can Be Together Forever (#300), For the Beauty of the Earth (#92), and Love One Another (#308). Relatively few of the “Children” hymns were very popular, but some were I Am a Child of God (#301) and Dearest Children, God Is Near You (#96).

So, it’s clear that most music coordinators look at the “Motherhood” entry in the index, with some looking at the “Home” category. I think an honorable mention hymn is Each Life That Touches Ours for Good (#293). The lyrics suggest it’s more about friends or even a funeral hymn, but it’s a relatively uncommon hymn that doesn’t appear to be sung at any other time of the year too much.

While the likelihood of your ward singing any one of these hymns is relatively low, the likely hood of your ward singing any of these, say, top 10 hymns is pretty good. In fact, 89.3% of wards sing at least one of those 10 hymns each year. Over half sing two of them, a third sing just one, and a few wards sing three of them. So, odds are pretty good you’ll sing one or two of those most popular hymns.

Finally, we can look at when during sacrament meeting these most popular hymns are sung. Figure 2 shows the data for the top 10 Mother’s Day hymns. Perhaps the most striking trend is that Love One Another (#308) is almost always a closing hymn when it’s sung on Mother’s Day. Families Can Be Together Forever (#300) and Teach Me to Walk in the Light (#304) are also typically a closing hymn. Pretty much all the others, including most of the “Motherhood” hymns, are more commonly opening hymns.

Figure 2: Top 10 Mother’s Day hymns and when they’re sung.

So that’s it for Mother’s Day hymns! This was a shorter post than normal, but there’s not too much else to say!