Father’s Day is now celebrated every year on the third Sunday in June.
The day celebrating fathers has a long history — and it withstood some early controversy.
Mother’s Day was the first of the two holidays to be created.
Anna Jarvis was the originator of Mother’s Day by hosting the holiday for the first time in 1907 at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, with a service that was dedicated to her mother who passed away two years earlier.
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Mother’s Day quickly gained traction, and just a few years later, the holiday was being celebrated across the United States.
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made the occasion an official holiday. While Mother’s Day was quickly accepted and celebrated, Father’s Day had a rockier start.
Father’s Day is celebrated in the U.S. every third Sunday in June. (iStock)
The year 1908 was when a church in West Virginia held a sermon honoring 362 men who were killed the year before in a coal mining explosion.
In 1910, Sonora Smart Dodd of Washington decided that like mothers, fathers should also be honored.
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Her father was a widower who raised six children on a farm. His daughter strongly believed that fatherhood should be celebrated.
It took many years for the occasion to be marked an official holiday, and many fathers didn’t like the day at its start.
There were a couple of reasons why Father’s Day was controversial during the early years. For one, many men thought that day was purely a commercial holiday.
The road to Father’s Day becoming an official holiday was a long one, with some controversy at the start. (iStock)
Another reason for controversy was that Mother’s Day was a day honoring “that tender, gentle army, the mothers of America.”
This was how President Wilson described Mother’s Day. When Father’s Day followed, many men believed that the day was wrapped up within those same ideas.
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They “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products — often paid for by the father himself,” a historian wrote of the day, per History.com.
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Eventually, the day was embraced, but it wasn’t until 1972 when President Richard Nixon officially declared the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day, although that isn’t the day it is celebrated worldwide.
Father’s Day is often spent doing an activity that fathers enjoy. One popular way to spend the day is fishing. (iStock)
Countries including Spain, Portugal and Italy honor fathers on Saint Joseph’s Day, which falls on March 19.
Now, Father’s Day is a holiday widely celebrated.
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During the day, fathers often receive gifts from children and spend the day doing activities that they enjoy.
