This year Father’s Day will be celebrated on Sunday, June 19. Father’s Day is a celebration of fathers inaugurated in the early 20th century to complement Mother’s Day in celebrating fatherhood and male parenting. It is also celebrated to honour and commemorate our forefathers. Father’s Day is celebrated on a variety of dates worldwide and typically involves gift-giving, special dinners to fathers, and family-oriented activities.On June 19, 1910, an independently-invented Father’s Day observance was celebrated through the efforts of Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington. After listening to a church sermon at Spokane’s Central Methodist Episcopal Church in 1909 about the newly recognised Mother’s Day, Dodd felt strongly that fatherhood needed recognition, as well. She wanted a celebration that honoured fathers like her own father, William Smart, a Civil War veteran who was left to raise his family alone when his wife died giving birth to their sixth child when Sonora was 16 years old.The following year with the assistance of Reverend Dr. Conrad Bluhm, her pastor at Old Centenary Presbyterian Church (now Knox Presbyterian Church), Sonora took the idea to the Spokane YMCA. The Spokane YMCA, along with the Ministerial Alliance, endorsed Dodd’s idea and helped it spread by celebrating the first Father’s Day in 1910. Sonora suggested her father’s birthday, June 5, be established as the day to honour all Fathers. However, the pastors wanted more time to prepare, so on June 19, 1910, young members of the YMCA went to church wearing roses: a red rose to honour a living father, and a white rose to honor a deceased one. Dodd travelled through the city in a horse-drawn carriage, carrying gifts to shut-in fathers confined indoors by illness.It took many years to make the holiday official. In spite of support from the YWCA, the YMCA, and churches, Father’s Day ran the risk of disappearing from the calendar. Where Mother’s Day was met with enthusiasm, Father’s Day was often met with laughter. The holiday was gathering attention slowly, but for the wrong reasons. It was the target of much satire, parody and derision, including jokes from the local newspaper Spokesman-Review. Many people saw it as the first step in filling the calendar with mindless promotions.A bill to accord national recognition of the holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson went to Spokane to speak in a Father’s Day celebration and wanted to make it official, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialiaed. US President Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed by the nation, but stopped short of issuing a national proclamation. Two earlier attempts to formally recognise the holiday had been defeated by Congress. In 1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years while honouring mothers, thus “singling out just one of our two parents”. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honouring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.In addition to Father’s Day, International Men’s Day is celebrated in many countries on November 19 for men and boys who are not fathers.