With Mother’s Day past we are now looking toward honoring our fathers with similar sentiment on their special day. The campaign to recognize and celebrate our nations father was met with some resistance, and not with the same enthusiasm as Mother’s Day. This is perhaps as one florist explained, “Father’s haven’t the same sentimental appeal as mothers have.”
One of the first recognitions of Father’s Day was in a West Virginia Church on July 5, 1908, when they had an event to explicitly honor fathers. The Sunday sermon was given in memory of the 362 men who died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday.
One year later a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. Sonora was one of six children raised by a widower in Spokane Washington. She appealed to local churches, the YMCA, shop keepers, and government officials for help in supporting her idea and she was successful. The first Statewide Father’s Day was celebrated in Washington State on June 19, 1910. The holiday slowly spread to other states, and in1916, President Wilson honored the day by using a telegraph signal to unfurl a flag in Spokane Washington when he pushed a button in Washington D.C. In the year 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged all state governments to observe Father’s Day.
This year, the day we will observe and celebrate Father’s Day in the United States will occur on June 19, 2022.
The man who was the inspiration for Father’s Day was a single father and a civil war vet. Many men however continue to look at this day with some disdain, as one historian wrote they “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving or they derided the proliferation of such a holiday as a commercial gimmick to sell more products-often paid for by the father himself.”
What he was missing is the fact that this day honors all Men who have embraced the role of Fatherhood. We use this wonderful day to thank Fathers, Uncles, Grandfathers, and Father figures who impact the lives of our country’s children and populate the land with responsible, well-rounded human beings. So, with that in mind, let’s make Father’s Day 2022 one for the memory books. In this day and age all families need leadership that comes from unconditional Love!