Ask any father. He’ll tell you.
Father’s Day is a crock. Oh, sure, you get a tie, but to a dad, a tie is like giving your mother a vacuum.
You see, the thing is, Father’s Day is in the summer, and Mother’s Day is during the school year. So moms
get all the fun stuff that the kids make, like homemade cards or baby food jars filled with water and glitter. Fathers
get doodley. What we need is a holiday that we can appreciate, one where we get to sit around and drink beer and watch
sports... well... other than the Super Bowl, or the World Series, or Nascar, or any given weekend from, say, August through
February, or March through July.
Even
the history of Father’s Day is a crock. For instance, President Woodrow Wilson signed Mother’s Day into
law. Who do the fathers get? Richard Nixon. And even at that, it was Johnson who, in 1966, “declared
that the third Sunday in June would be Father's Day.” Nixon only signed it into law in 1972 to help with his re-election...
and we all know how well that presidency went. (Honor Your Father... At Least Once a Year)
Probably the only reason Father’s Day exists at all is because of Mother’s Day.
Oh, sure, you can say it stems from the memorial service in Monongah, West Virginia, following a mining accident in 1907 that
killed a whole bunch of men, many of whom happened to be fathers (which, curiously enough, often seems to be the case when
a large group of men get killed). Or you can credit a lady named Sonora Smart Dodd, who, along with her five brothers
and sisters were raised solely by her father when her mother died in the early part of the 20th century.
But even Dodd was inspired by Anna Jarvis, the founder of Mother’s Day. (Father's Day in United States)
In 1909 Dodd began her campaign in her home town of
Spokane, Washington, and by the following year succeeded in getting Washington State to recognize “...the nation’s
first statewide Father’s Day on July 19, 1910.” (Father’s Day) And from there, the holiday spread...
slowly. President Wilson observed the day in 1916 by unfurling a flag in Spokane by pressing a button in Washington,
D.C., a technological feat for the time. In 1924, still well short of a national holiday, “President Calvin Coolidge
made it a national event to ‘establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon
fathers the full measure of their obligations.’" (Honor Your Father... At Least Once a Year) You know, guys,
it’s pretty pathetic that we need a presidential proclamation to remind us to take care of our families.
But then, probably the biggest obstacle in recognizing
Father’s Day was the fathers. I mean, we are talking guys here. “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.’”
(Father’s Day)
Even so, the idea
of Father’s Day continued to grow, surviving the well meaning attempts in the ‘20s and ‘30s to scrap the
day altogether, along with Mother’s Day, in favour of just one single holiday, Parents’ Day, based on the idea
“‘that both parents should be loved and respected together.’” (Father’s Day) But any kid,
and every retailer, knows that if you share a holiday with somebody else, like having your birthday fall on Christmas, then
you get shafted on your presents. And even during the Depression, or maybe especially because of the Depression, retailers
weren’t about to get behind any holiday that limited their sales. By the time WWII engulfed the United States,
even though Father’s Day still wasn’t a nationally declared holiday, it might as well have been. And with
the War, it became a way to honor those men in uniform. (Father’s Day)
Since 1972, Father’s Day has been an official national holiday. Even so, it’s
still hard to get excited about it. I mean, let’s face it: Nobody’s going to buy dad a corsage, he’s
not going to wear a new dress to church, and it’s doubtful that he’s even going to go out to lunch on that Sunday
afternoon. Sure, he’ll get some phone calls if his children can remember, but for the most part, it’s just
another Sunday. And since it’s in the summer, the lawn probably needs to be mowed... by dad.
