Poll of the Day > Anybody know why Father's Day is on the 3rd Sunday in June...

(+) Yeah! (+)

While Mother's Day is on the 2nd Sunday in May?

Why can't they both start on the same week of the Month?

Just combine them both into a single holiday. Parents day. That way I only have to take them to dinner once.


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It's weird, back in Australia mothers day is on the same day, but fathers day is in September

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Because made-up holidays with no real tradition behind them can take place whenever someone wants them to.
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Though a Father's Day service was held on July 5, 1908 in West Virginia to honor the fathers killed in the Monongah Mine Disaster, it is Sonora Smart Dodd who is credited as the founder of the official American national holiday[4]

Smart held her father in great esteem. While hearing a church sermon about the newly recognized Mother's Day at Central Methodist Episcopal Church,[5] Sonora felt strongly that fatherhood needed recognition as well. She approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and suggested her own father's birthday, of June 5, as the day of honor for fathers. The Alliance chose the third Sunday in June instead.

The first Father's Day was celebrated June 19, 1910, in Spokane, Washington. Although observance of the holiday faded in the 1920s,[6] over time, the idea of Father's Day became popular and embraced across the nation. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson sent a telegraph to Spokane praising Father's Day services. William Jennings Bryan was another early admirer of the observance.[7] In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day. In 1972, President Nixon established a permanent national observance of Father's Day to be held on the 3rd Sunday of June each year.

Dodd was honored at Expo '74, the World's Fair, in Spokane in 1974. She died four years later at the age of ninety-six, and was buried in Greenwood Memorial Terrace in Spokane.

In its present form, Mother's Day was established by Anna Jarvis with the help of Philadelphia merchant John Wanamaker following the death of her mother, Ann Jarvis, on May 9, 1905. Jarvis never mentioned Howe or Mothering Sunday, and she never mentioned any connection to the Protestant school celebrations, always claiming that the creation of Mother's Day was hers alone.[12]

A small service was held on May 12, 1907 in the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna's mother had been teaching Sunday school.[4] The first "official" service of worship was on May 10, 1908, in the same church, accompanied by a larger ceremony in the Wanamaker Auditorium in the Wanamaker's store in Philadelphia.[4] The next year the day was reported to be widely celebrated in New York.[13]

Jarvis then campaigned to establish Mother's Day first as a U.S. national holiday and then later as an international holiday.[14] The holiday was declared officially by the state of West Virginia in 1910, and the rest of the states followed quickly.[4]

On May 10, 1913, the U.S. House of Representativespassed a resolution calling on all federal government officials (from the president down) to wear a white carnation the following day in observance of Mother's Day.[15] On May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day and requesting a proclamation. The next day, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother's Day[16][17] as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.[16] In 1934, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a stamp commemorating the holiday.[18]

In May 2008, the U.S. House of Representativesvoted twice on a resolution commemorating Mother's Day,[19][20] the first one being passed without a dissenting vote (21 members not voting).[19] The Saint Andrews Methodist Church, where the first celebration was held, is now the International Mother's Day Shrine and is a National Historic Landmark.[21]

^thanks for the history lessons, but it still doesn't really explain why the put it on the 3rd week...now if the lady's Dad B-Day was near/during the 3rd week, then I would understand, but why the Gov't moved it to there?