Sunday is American Father’s Day

The truth is that we don’t celebrate Father’s Day in the Philippines. It is an American celebration and if it is celebrated at all in the Philippines, it is by the so-called elitist who have been influenced by the advertisements of restaurants as to where to dine with your family to mark the occasion.

Actually, it was the Lions Club that propagated Father’s Day celebration in the United States and established the third Sunday of June as its official day. It was not till 1972 that Pres. Richard M. Nixon signed a Congressional Resolution designating that date not only as Father’s Day, but as an official holiday.

Before the United States upgraded Father’s Day into an official national celebration, the closest thing to having a day in honor of fathers was the ancient Roman Parentalia, that was observed from the 13th to the 22nd of February. The big difference was that it was not in honor of living fathers, but for all the departed parents and relatives. It was more of an All Soul’s than a Father’s Day celebration. The ultimate proof is that the observance was held in the cemetery. So Father’s Day truly began in the United States.

Here is Adlai E. Stevenson’s address before the National Father’s Day Committee in 1961:

"Now it has been said that paternity is a career imposed on you one fine morning without any inquiry as to your fitness for it. That is why there are so many fathers who have children but so few children who have fathers.

"What nonsense. There is absolutely no excuse for a parent to abdicate his most important duty – the proper raising of his children. No father should be allowed to get away with the cowardly logic which concludes that his only job in the family is to pay for the bacon. His role is much more grandiose than that.

If it is to be properly fulfilled, he should be, in his realm, a man of many faces – an artist, a philosopher, a statesman, and, above all, a prolific dispenser of good sense and justice.

"But it is vitally important, especially in the early years, that his children see in father a working model of the social order in which, not so many years hence, they will be expected to play a dynamic part.

"How can we, the parents, hope to secure a just and rational society if we neglect the development of those very instruments, our children, most necessary for its implementation? What good does it do to conceive grand moral, social, or political plans for a better world if the children who will have to live them out fail to see their importance?

"In a very real sense, a father’s relations with his children should be a micro-cosmic reflection of their relations with the society in which they live. Through his actions a father must teach his children the intrinsic meaning of the democratic concept – freedom with restraint and the nature of integrity."