Step asides Mama’s! Now it’s time for the Papas! In our Mother’s Day article, we talked about how Mother’s Day came to be! Strangely enough, the same woman (Ann Reeves Jarvis) who helped create Mother’s Day as an official holiday in 1914, then regretted it after all of the commercialism surrounding it and tried to undo it, was an inspiration for Father’s Day!
On July 5, 1908, a church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had 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. The next year, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful and the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. In 1972, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday.
Many men, however, continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, 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.” Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.
At one point in the 1930’s, there was a movement that tried to combine Mother’s and Father’s Day into “Parent’s Day” but as we know, that never worked out. So for all the great Father’s out there, be it your own or someone you feel as your own, let’s give it up to those hard working, loyal, ride or die Dads out there with some funny memes!
So what will you be doing with your Dad this Sunday? Will you make breakfast in bed? Let him sleep in, take him out for a steak dinner? Let us know how you will be celebrating and also share with us some of your favorite memes in the chat!
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