Fathers Day Gifts Ideas

Father’s day is a special day of the year where families honor their fathers and grandfathers, and celebrate the important institution of fatherhood. It’s a day of gift giving, and is usually celebrated with families coming together for lunches or dinners. While Father’s Day is acknowledged on different days in different countries it most typically falls on the third Sunday in June.

In many nations, Father’s Day is celebrated as a secular holiday however given the loving and honoring nature of the day many religious heads include Father’s Day in the sermons that they give to their followers.

Countries such as Italy and Spain and others that are predominantly Roman Catholic celebrate Father’s Day on the nineteenth day of March, also known as St. Joseph’s Day, or the Feast of St Joseph. In Thailand, Father’s Day is celebrated on the birthday of the king. In Taiwan, Father’s Day is observed on the eighth day of the eighth month as the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of the number 8 is ‘ba’ – which sounds very similar to the character used for ‘papa’ or ‘father’. Australia and New Zealand celebrate the day in September, and since 2010 Romania celebrates Father’s Day in May – until last year it had been the only country in the EU which didn’t acknowledge a Father’s Day.

In the US, and in many other countries, Father’s Day is celebrated on the third Sunday in the month of June and this is a tradition that dates back to beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1908, the first observance of Father’s Day in the US took place in West Virginia when Grace Golden Clayton arranged a day to celebrate the lives of 210 fathers lost in a mining disaster at Monongah. A few years later, Sonora Smart Dodd, listening to a sermon on Mother’s Day in Spokane, Washington, decided a day was needed to honor fathers. Dodd’s own father was William Smart, a Civil War veteran who raised a family of six children after his wife died in childbirth.

These thoughts galvanized Dodd into approaching church officialdom and the YMCA with the request that a day be reserved to commemorate the service provided by fathers and this led the Church to designate Father’s Day to be held in middle of June each year. The first official Father’s Day took place in 1910.

Congress resisted the introduction of a national Father’s Day holiday for many years. Many formal attempts to acknowledge the holiday were defeated in Congress (who feared the day would become commercialized) until President Lyndon B Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring Father’s Day. A few years later, President Richard Nixon signed the day as a permanent national holiday into law in 1972.