Father's Day, in the United States, is a holiday (third Sunday in June) to honor fathers. Credit for originating the holiday is generally given to Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, whose father, a Civil War veteran, raised her and her five siblings after their mother died in childbirth. She is said to have had the idea in 1909 while listening to a sermon on Mother's Day, which at the time was becoming established as a holiday.
The first observance of Father's Day actually took place in Fairmont, West Virginia on July 5, 1908. It was organized by Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton, who wanted to celebrate the lives of the 210 fathers who had been lost in the Monongah Mining disaster several months earlier in Monongah, West Virginia, on December 6, 1907. It's possible that Clayton was influenced by the first celebration of Mother's Day that same year, just a few miles away. Clayton chose the Sunday nearest to the birthday of her recently deceased father.
Unfortunately, the day was overshadowed by other events in the city, West Virginia did not officially register the holiday, and it was not celebrated again. All the credit for Father's Day went to Sonora Dodd from Spokane, who invented independently her own celebration of Father's Day just two years later, also influenced by Jarvis' Mother's Day.
Clayton's celebration was forgotten until 1972, when one of the attendants to the celebration saw Nixon's proclamation of Father's Day, and worked to recover its legacy. The celebration is now held every year in the Central United Methodist Church – the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church, South, was torn down in 1922. Fairmont is now promoted as the "Home of the First Father's Day Service".
Although it was originally largely a religious holiday, Father's Day has been commercialized with the sending of greeting cards and the giving of gifts. Some observe the custom of wearing a red rose to indicate that one's father is living or a white rose to indicate that he is deceased. Other males—for example, grandfathers or uncles who have assumed parenting roles—are often also honored on the day. Some Roman Catholics have continued to observe the feast day of Saint Joseph, on March 19, as a tribute to fathers.
The Associated Men's Wear Retailers formed a National Father's Day Committee in New York City in the 1930s, which was renamed in 1938 to National Council for the Promotion of Father's Day and incorporated several other trade groups. This council had the goals of legitimizing the holiday in the mind of the people and managing the holiday as a commercial event in a more systematic way, in order to boost the sales during the holiday. This council always had the support of Dodd, who had no problem with the commercialization of the holiday and endorsed several promotions to increase the amount of gifts. In this aspect she can be considered the opposite of Anna Jarvis, who actively opposed all commercialization of Mother's Day.
The merchants recognized the tendency to parody and satirize the holiday, and used it to their benefit by mocking the holiday on the same advertisements where they promoted the gifts for fathers. People felt compelled to buy gifts even though they saw through the commercial façade, and the custom of giving gifts on that day became progressively more accepted. By 1937 the Father's Day Council calculated that only one father in six had received a present on that day. However, by the 1980s, the Council proclaimed that they had achieved their goal: the one-day event had become a three-week commercial event, a "second Christmas". Its executive director explained back in 1949 that, without the coordinated efforts of the Council and of the groups supporting it, the holiday would have disappeared.
Although the name of the event is usually understood as a plural possessive (i.e. "day belonging to fathers"), which would under normal English punctuation guidelines be spelled "Fathers' Day," the most common spelling is "Father's Day," as if it were a singular possessive (i.e. "day belonging to Father"). In the United States, Dodd used the "Fathers' Day" spelling on her original petition for the holiday, but the spelling "Father's Day" was already used in 1913 when a bill was introduced to the U.S. Congress as the first attempt to establish the holiday, and it was still spelled the same way when its creator was commended in 2008 by the U.S. Congress.
62 years passed between the first Father's Day celebration and its recognition as an
official holiday.
Father's Day is now celebrated in every part of the world. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and many other countries, it falls on the third Sunday in June.
- Daddy's Little Girl - Karla Bonoff
- Just The Two Of Us - Will Smith
- Father and Daughter – Paul Simon
- Daddy, What If – Bobby Bare
- Father To Son – Queen
- Families – Lou Reed
- Kooks – David Bowie
- Father and Son – Cat Stevens
- Papa Was a Rolling Stone – Temptations
- Ships – Ian Hunter
- Daddy's Hands - Holly Dunn
- My Father's Eyes - Eric Clapton
- Papa, Can You Hear Me? - Barbra Streisand
- Old Man - Neil Young
- Butterfly kisses - Bob Carlisle
- Sorry Love Daddy - Brian McFadden
- Father's Day - Cast "Children Of Eden Soundtrack"
- Seein' My Father In Me - Paul Overstreet
Another Badd Creation Productions (Clay County Mobile DJ Service, 32656)
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