How many days until Mother's Day?

Mother's Day in the United Arab Emirates is 21 March, and it is worth being precise about that, because it is neither the British date nor the American one. The Arab world marks Mother's Day on the day of the spring equinox — a convention introduced by the Egyptian journalist Mustafa Amin in the 1950s and adopted across the region since — while the United Kingdom keeps Mothering Sunday in Lent and the United States the second Sunday of May.

For a country where the great majority of residents are expatriates, that means the date is genuinely contested inside individual households. A British family here may keep the March Sunday, an American family May, and an Emirati or Egyptian family the 21st, and it is entirely normal for the same office to mark all three.

The 21st is not a public holiday, so the working day runs as usual, but government bodies, schools and hospitals mark it publicly, and it sits alongside the arrival of spring in the way the founders of the date intended. It also lands six days after Emirati Children's Day on 15 March, which turns the middle of that month into a cluster of family-focused dates.

The countdown runs to the start of 21 March and resets to the following year once the date has passed.