Father's Day is this
weekend, for those of you who have them. For those of you who don't,
happy Awkward Moments Day.
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| I celebrate that with booze. |
1) Father's Day is celebrated on the third Sunday in June in the United States, and some other
countries, like Ireland, the UK, and Aruba, of all places. Some
countries celebrate Father's Day at other times of the year. In Germany, Father's Day coincides with Ascension Day, the Thursday
forty days following Easter. Traditionally, men fill up a small cart,
or Bollerwagen, with food, beer and wine and drag it around in the
woods whilst getting drunk.
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| Just another advantage men have in the patriarchy. |
2) While more phone calls are
placed on Mother's Day than on Father's Day in the United States,
Father's Day is the busiest day of the year for collect calls.
Because Dad can afford it, I guess, since he didn't spend his entire
working life cleaning up after you, like Mom did.
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| "I'll call him, but I'm not gonna pay for it!" |
Father's Day is generally
less celebrated than Mother's Day. This may be because more people
have mothers than have fathers, and also because people tend to
appreciate their mothers more. Also, because Mother's Day is a full
one hundred years older than Father's Day, so...it has more momentum?
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| I guess? |
3) The recognized founder of
Father's Day was Sonora Smart Dodd, who was one of the six children
of William Jackson Smart, a single father and Civil War veteran.
After learning about Anna Jarvis and her efforts to establish
Mother's Day as a national holiday, she suggested to her pastor that
fathers, too, should be honored with a nationally recognized holiday.
The pastor agreed, and the first officially recognized Father's Day
was celebrated on the third Sunday in June, 1910, in Spokane,
Washington.
The celebration of Father's
Day remained in Spokane for many years, and faded into obscurity when
Dodd moved to Chicago to attend the Art Institute in the 1920s. When
she returned to Spokane in the 1930s, she revived the celebration.
This time, she got the support of manufacturers of men's products –
ties, tobacco, things of that nature.
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| It was illegal for women to smoke back then. |
In 1938 the New York
Associated Men's Wear Retailers formed the Father's Day Council in
order to promote (and commercialize) the emerging holiday. Several
attempts by various Presidents to make Father's Day an official
national holiday failed, until Richard Nixon succeeded in
establishing Father's Day as a national holiday in 1972.
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| One of his many successful endeavors, to be sure. |
4) Those of you from West
Virginia (yay West Virginia!) will know that the real first Father's Day was held on 5 July 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in
the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South...wait a
minute, Methodist and Episcopal?
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| Someone care to explain that? |
The celebration was, in
fact, a memorial service for the 361 men killed in the December 1907
Monogah Mining Disaster. The 250 fathers in that group left behind
almost 1,000 children. Grace Golden Clayton, who was mourning the
loss of her father, Fletcher Golden, to unrelated misfortune, asked
her pastor, Robert Thomas Webb, to perform a service honoring the
fathers lost in the Monogah Mining Disaster. It is said that Ms.
Clayton was inspired by the recent Mother's Day celebration held by
Anna Jarvis in nearby Grafton, West Virginia just two months
previous.
Clayton's Father's Day
celebration didn't catch on, however; it was overshadowed by other
events, and Clayton was said to be too shy to promote the event
outside of her church.
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| That's what being shy gets you. |
