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This year, Father’s Day falls on 21st June – or at least, it does for us Brits, Irish, Americans, Canadians, South Africans, and most of the English-speaking world. Alongside us, many other countries also celebrate on the third Sunday of June, from France and Ukraine to India and China, while much of the Middle East does so on 21st June every year – which happily coincides with us for 2026! However, our Aussie and Kiwi cousins won’t be celebrating until September; Spanish, Portuguese and Italian dads had their day back in March; Scandinavian countries celebrate on the second Sunday of November… Around the world, it’s a fairly awkward occasion!
The reason for such varied dates cannot, for once, be attributed to a convoluted history. Instead, while Mother’s Day in the UK can be traced back to at least the 16th century via Mothering Sunday, Father’s Day is younger than the aeroplane. Indeed, the problem is quite the opposite: Father’s Day is such a new occasion that its date was not settled before it became a modern global phenomenon. For us Brits in particular, it is an American import that arrived on our shores barely two generations ago; many of your own dads, very probably, never gave a Father’s Day card to their fathers. So, how did it originate – and why did it take so long to emerge?
Fairmont Coal Company's No. 5 and 8 mines at Monongah in Marion County.
A Tragic Precursor
On 6th December 1907, an explosion tore through the Fairmont Coal Company’s mines at Monongah, West Virginia, killing 362 men. By some estimates, over a thousand children were left fatherless in what remains the worst mining disaster in US history. In nearby Fairmont, the local Methodist congregation at Williams Memorial Church included one Mrs Grace Golden Clayton, who had recently lost her own father. Perhaps inspired by the first Mother’s Day observance – held less than 20 miles away in Grafton, West Virginia, on 10th May 1908 – and moved by the horror of the recent mining tragedy, she suggested to her minister that a commemorative service for fathers be held. It took place on 5th July 1908.
Sadly, falling awkwardly amongst Independence Day celebrations and several unrelated tragedies, and with no national press attention or real effort to publicise it, the service remained a solemn one-off rather than becoming a new tradition.
Sonora Dodd, circa 1910
Image courtesy of Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture / Eastern Washington State Historical Society
Sounce: Encyclopedia of Arkansas
An Unsung Hero
The modern Father’s Day was the brainchild of a young woman named Sonora Smart Dodd. In May 1909, while listening to a Mother’s Day sermon in Central Methodist Episcopal Church, Spokane, Washington, she found herself thinking instead of her father. Her mother had died in childbirth 11 years earlier, leaving William Jackson Smart – a veteran of the American Civil War – to raise Sonora and her five younger brothers alone. The absence of any parallel celebration of fathers, to her, was quite stark.
An unusual woman for her time – a published poet, painter and sculptor who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked for a time in Hollywood fashion design – and very driven, by all accounts, she quickly set about correcting this. Lobbying both the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and the local YMCA, Dodd successfully petitioned for a Father’s Day service the following summer. Though her original suggestion was 5th June, her father’s birthday, the clergy needed more time to prepare their sermons and so the date was shifted to 19th June – the third Sunday of June – and there it has remained.
Sonora Smart Dodd House, Spokane, Washington.
Image via the Spokane City / County Historic Preservation Office Historic Properties Database.
Trials and Tribulations
Dodd’s creation was met with sustained derision throughout America: the news media, particularly cartoonists, ridiculed it as soppy and unmanly, satirical poems mocked the idea that a stoic head of the household needed to be presented with flowers by his children, editorials called it a transparent commercial knock-off of Mother’s Day, and Congress repeatedly refused to formalise it.
The first bill failed in 1913 and even President Calvin Coolidge’s endorsement in 1924 made no difference – several more proposals were dismissed through the 1930s, 40s and 50s. It was not until 1966 that Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation. Even then, it took a further six years before Richard Nixon finally signed Father’s Day into permanent national law. After 62 years of campaigning, Sonora Smart Dodd had finally achieved her goal. In 2010, on the centenary of her creation, her former home in Spokane was added to the United States National Register of Historic Places.
But just over the pond, the idea faced even greater opposition. If America’s ideal of fatherhood was a proudly stoic head of the household, Britain’s ideal was that with a stiff upper lip on top, leading to much disdain for the concept. Furthermore, it held the stigma of being a soppy American import and, unlike Mother’s Day, had no historical equivalent that could be used to dress it up as a revival, nor (as a Protestant nation) a saint’s feast day to anchor it in the religious calendar. And so, while Mothering Sunday had a widespread nationwide revival in the 1910s and 1920s thanks to the campaigning of Constance Adelaide Smith and the support of the clergy, Father’s Day arrived mostly in dribs and drabs through America’s post-war influence on British retail, advertising and popular culture. By the 1970s, however, the occasion had become well established – and today, scarcely anyone thinks to question it.
Red Roses and Religious Revision
With a lack of history comes a lack of settled traditions. Even the original symbol of the holiday was a casualty of its early opposition: the rose. A red one to honour a living father, a white one in memory of a deceased father. Contemporary US newspaper coverage from 1913 confirms that the tradition was already firmly established there but today, sadly, this beautiful convention has all but vanished. Instead, the symbol is – perhaps somewhat depressingly – a tie. In place of any overarching traditions, we each have our own: breakfast in bed, a pint at the pub, or simply a day off to go golfing, fishing or to kick a ball around in the park.
As an interesting aside, you may see St Boniface – an English-born monk and the patron saint of Germany – described as “the patron saint of fathers” alongside claims that his feast day of 5th June was observed as an old British Father’s Day, but this appears to be an invented pseudohistory with no basis in reality. Standard Catholic hagiography assigns him no such patronage and instead applies this patronage to St Joseph, husband of Mary and foster-father of Jesus.
Elsewhere in the world, Father’s Day has acquired traditions through means that were inaccessible to us. As majority-Protestant Britain was influenced into adopting Father’s Day by the United States, so the concept spread around the world, prompting many Catholic majority countries to graft the celebration onto an existing religious occasion: the feast day of the aforementioned St Joseph on 19th March. Though this day has been honoured since at least the 10th century, it was not until the mid-20th century that countries like Spain and Italy began to repurpose it into a celebration of fathers.
The feast itself, however, carries centuries of traditions, many of which remain to this day – whether now linked to a celebration of fathers or not. One of the most evocative of these customs, perhaps, comes from Sicily, where St Joseph is the patron saint of the island. According to local legend, the tradition reaches back to a mediaeval famine: peasants prayed to St Joseph for rain to break a drought, the rains came and the fava bean harvest that followed saved them from starvation. In gratitude, Sicilian families have prepared the “Tavola di San Giuseppe” (St Joseph’s Table/Altar) on his feast day ever since. These constructions are quite remarkable – built in three tiers to represent the Trinity and topped with a statue of Joseph, they are laden with breads shaped into religious symbols and carpenter’s tools, fava beans, citrus fruits, cardoons and elaborate pastries. Because the feast falls during Lent, no meat is included and afterwards the food is donated to the poor. The day’s signature pastry is the “zeppola di San Giuseppe” – a fried or baked round of choux pastry filled with custard or ricotta and topped with a sour cherry. Having discovered the deliciousness of the zeppola di San Giuseppe, we are now formally lobbying for its adoption into Britain’s own Father’s Day celebrations!
Around the World on Eight-ish Sundays
Of course, the rest of the world seems to have decided to make everything as complicated as possible. After a decade of scattered observances, Australian Father’s Day settled on the first Sunday of September in the mid-1930s – mostly for boring reasons of calendar logistics – and New Zealand followed suit shortly after. Elsewhere, celebrations have fallen at all sorts of times: Thailand celebrates on 5th December – the birthday of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who reigned for 70 years and was regarded as the father of the nation – on which Thai fathers are traditionally presented with a canna lily by their children; Brazil celebrates on the second Sunday of August, explicitly honouring fathers and forefathers alike; Scandinavia marks the day on the second Sunday of November; Germany has its own celebration on Ascension Day, 40 days after Easter, for which the principal tradition is a country hike with a handcart and a quantity of beer perhaps best described as ambitious.
Taiwan can be forgiven for having its own special date, 8th August, because it has such a good reason. In Mandarin Chinese, the number eight is bā (八), so eight-eight, bā-bā, sounds like bàba (爸爸), meaning “daddy”. What better way to celebrate fathers than with an awful “dad joke” pun?
Your Father's Day
And so we have it: an occasion with very little history, conceived by a young American woman to honour her widowed father, mocked for decades by the very nation that invented it, slowly imported here without fanfare and with even more derision, grafted elsewhere onto religious feasts and now observed on well over a dozen different dates around the globe!
Whichever date you celebrate on, we hope you have a wonderful Father’s Day with your father, grandfather, or any other fathers or father figures in your life. And as you send your Father's Day card, spare a moment to thank Sonora Smart Dodd, who spent six decades of her life ensuring you would have a card to send.
