Look up Valentine or valentine in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. A valentine is a card or gift given on Valentine’s Day, or one’s sweetheart. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended 14 february valentine’s day gift. Father’s Day is a celebration honoring people’s fathers and celebrating the fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of fathers in society.
It was first proposed by Sonora Dodd of Spokane, Washington in 1909. Father’s Day was inaugurated in the United States in the early 20th century to complement Mother’s Day in celebrating fathers, fathering, and fatherhood. Father’s Day was founded in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas. It did not have much success initially.
In the 1920s, Dodd stopped promoting the celebration because she was studying in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it faded into relative obscurity, even in Spokane. In the 1930s Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the celebration again, raising awareness at a national level. A bill to accord national recognition of the holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913. 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. A “Father’s Day” service was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South, now known as Central United Methodist Church. Clayton’s event did not have repercussions outside of Fairmont for several reasons, among them: the city was overwhelmed by other events, the celebration was never promoted outside of the town itself and no proclamation was made in the City Council.