Unless you’re a crappy son/daughter/husband, you know that yesterday was Mother’s Day. The annual holiday allows us to honor the most important person in our young lives, and the first woman we ever truly loved, our mommas. It’s also a day for lucky children to thank the stars that their mothers didn’t screw them up – I mean, things were a lot different back in the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s and 80s.

Case in point, this vintage ad touting the “gentleness” of some new cigarette packaging. “Proud mothers, please forgive us if we too feel something of the pride of a new parent,” it says. “For new Philip Morris, today’s Philip Morris, is delighting smokers everywhere. Enjoy the gentle pleasure, the fresh unfiltered flavor, of this new cigarette, born gentle, then refined to special gentleness in the making.”

You know, because this new cig is born gentle and fresh, just like our new baby. And it’s totally cool to smoke around your baby, but also hold him oh so very tight to your smoke-filled clothes. Mmmmm….fresh:

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As you can see, this ad ran in a 1956 edition of the Saturday Evening Post – an relic from a much different time. We’ve all seen Betty Draper puffing away both with and around child on Mad Men, but sometimes it’s hard for people my age to truly understand what motherhood was like 50 or 60 years ago. This vintage add perfectly captures one of the true oddities of past Americana – willful ignorance, questionable science, and manipulative advertising. None of those things are gone from today’s marketing landscape, but the consumer has evolved.

A little.

[via BoingBoing]