Father’s Day Weekend 06/14/19 – 06/17/19

Countryside Campground, Mogadore, Ohio

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. ~ Ephesians 6:4

NOTE: I’ve finally got good internet service, so we’ll be posting in rapid succession. As long as my editor will take the time to read. : ) If you’re interested in catching every moment in every post, you may have to scroll down. Don’t miss the Special Edition on Dwight L. Moody!

After our week with the boys, we came back to Mogadore for three nights – just long enough to set the coach to rights again, refill our cupboards, make food for our Father’s Day gathering and spend an evening at Kyle and Shena’s.  Oh.  And I took my mom to Akron/Canton airport so she could visit/babysit for my cousin in Fairfax, Virginia for a week.  I picked her up at 4:45AM.  Yawn . . .

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Extremely sad, but no one took any pictures on Father’s Day!!  Can you believe it???  In fact, no one took any pictures, except two that Kyle took of the kids!  I must have been more exhausted than I realized!  For shame!  In my defense, I did come home and sleep for over an hour and still went to bed by ten and slept all night.  But still!  No excuse!!  We should have, at the very least, taken a picture of all the father’s!  Ugh!!

In honor of father’s everywhere, here’s what I found on the History Channel website about the origins of Father’s Day (it includes a bit about Mother’s Day as well):

It was not until 1972 – 58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day official–that the day honoring fathers became a nationwide holiday in the United States. 

The “Mother’s Day” we celebrate today has its origins in the peace-and-reconciliation campaigns of the post-Civil War era. During the 1860s, at the urging of activist Ann Reeves Jarvis, one divided West Virginia town celebrated “Mother’s Work Days” that brought together the mothers of Confederate and Union soldiers.

However, Mother’s Day did not become a commercial holiday until 1908, when –inspired by Jarvis’s daughter, Anna Jarvis, who wanted to honor her own mother by making Mother’s Day a national holiday – the John Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia sponsored a service dedicated to mothers in its auditorium.

Thanks in large part to this association with retailers, who saw great potential for profit in the holiday, Mother’s Day caught on right away. In 1909, 45 states observed the day, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution that made the second Sunday in May a holiday in honor of “that tender, gentle army, the mothers of America.”

Origins of Father’s Day

The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm – perhaps because, as one florist explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.”

On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia 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 Spokane, Washington woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, 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: Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.

Slowly, the holiday spread. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day.

Today, the day honoring fathers is celebrated in the United States on the third Sunday of June.

In other countries–especially in Europe and Latin America–fathers are honored on St. Joseph’s Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19.

Father’s Day: Controversy and Commercialism

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.”

During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park–a public reminder, said Parents’ Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, “that both parents should be loved and respected together.”

Paradoxically, however, the Great Depression derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards.

When World War II began, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father’s Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution.

In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday at last. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.

And there you have it.  Once again, commercialism reigns supreme over the true meaning of the day.  Just like all the other holidays Americans celebrate.  Think about it . . . Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Presidents Day . . . .   And now, after writing this, I’m feeling a bit bah humbug.

Let’s end with a smile!  The only pictures anyone took today!  Thanks Kyle and Harper!

I searched my picture files and found these old Father’s Day pictures. 

It’s not much, but at least it’s something.  Although my own father is not worth noting, my grandfather’s were wonderful men in my eyes.  But it’s okay about my dad because between my mom, aunt, uncle (when I saw him) and grandparents, they more than made up for not having a dad around.

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But my sons and grandchildren have generations of wonderful legacy in their grandfathers and fathers!  Thank You, Heavenly Father, for all the godly men in our lives!  And how blessed we are to know the Perfect Father Who loves and cares for us more than we could ever ask or imagine!

How deep the Father’s love for us  How vast beyond all measure  That He should give His Only Son   To make a wretch His treasure

How great the pain of searing loss
The Father turns His face away
As wounds which mar the Chosen One
Bring many sons to glory

Behold the man upon a cross
My sin upon His shoulders
Ashamed, I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers

It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
His dying breath has brought me life
I know that it is finished

I will not boast in anything
No gifts, no power, no wisdom
But I will boast in Jesus Christ
His death and resurrection

Why should I gain from His reward?
I cannot give an answer
But this I know with all my heart
His wounds have paid my ransom
  ~ Hymn, written by Stuart Townend, 1990