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Father’s Day Facts and Fun

June 12, 2019

As Father’s Day approaches, we thought we would give you a little background of the Father”s Day …. and a funny video from Jimmy Kimmel.

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Each year Kimmel tortures father’s all over the world by doing a you tube challenge with a different subject each year. Sons and daughters take the challenge and post their videos to You Tube. In the past subjects were “Hey Dad Catch” “I Love You Dad” (above) and this year it’s “Here’s Some Cheese Dad” .

But, that brought to question why Father’s Day? Was it just a commercial way for merchants to make $$. Mother’s Day had been around for almost 70 years, before Father’s Day became official. And a recent survey showed that only 70% of parents buy gifts for Father’s Day , as compared to 80% for Mother’s Day.

Here are some interesting Fathers’ Day facts:

It has been celebrated on March 19 (Saint Joseph’s Day) since the Middle Ages. This celebration was brought by the Spanish and Portuguese to Latin America, where March 19 is often still used for it, though many countries in Europe and the Americas have adopted the U.S. date, which is the third Sunday of June
The first observance of a “Father’s Day” in the U.S. was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South, now known as Central United MethodistChurch. Grace Golden Clayton was mourning the loss of her father, when in December 1907, the Monongah Mining Disaster in nearby Monongah killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers, leaving around a thousand fatherless children. Clayton suggested that her pastor Robert Thomas Webb honor all those fathers.
On June 19, 1910, a Father’s Day celebration was held at the YMCA in Spokane, Washington, by Sonora Smart Dodd (born in Arkansas). Her father, the civil war veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six children there.
A bill to accord national recognition of the holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson went to Spokane to speak at a Father’s Day celebration and he wanted to make it an officially recognized federal holiday, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialized.
In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Fathers’ Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.