DID YOU KNOW:

MIDSUMMER DAY (June 24): To the farmer, this
day is the midpoint of the growing season, halfway between planting and harvest. (Midsummer Eve is
an occasion for festivity and celebrates fertility.)
The Anglican church considered it a "Quarter Day," one of the four major divisions of the liturgical year.
It also marks the feast day of St. John the Baptist.

FATHERS DAY: It's the 100th anniversary of their
day. Cultures around the world celebrate in
different ways. North America is not the only place where Father's Day is celebrated. In traditionally Catholic countries, such as Spain and Portugal, Father's Day is observed on March 19, the Feast of St. Joseph. In Taiwan, they celebrate Father's Day
on August 8, the eighth day of the eighth month, because the Mandarin Chinese word for eight
sounds like the word for "papa". In Thailand,
Father's Day occurs on the king's birthday, which
for current King Bhumibol Adulyadej, is
December 5.

Aureliz C Scott, author of Otherwise Normal People (Algonquin Books, 2007) writes about William
Jackson Smart who was such a great dad that he
inspired his daughter, Sonora Smart Dodd, to create
a holiday honoring fathers. Smart, a farmer and
Civil War veteran, raised Sonora and her five
younger brothers by himself after his wife died in 1898. While attending a Mother's Day church
service in 1909, Sonora, came up with the idea. So
it was that on June 19, 1910, Sonora rode in a
horse-drawn carriage to deliver presents to handicapped fathers, boys from the YMCA
decorated their lapels with fresh-cut roses and
the Spokane, Washington ministers devoted their homilies to fatherhood. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. Eight years later, President Calvin Coolidge signed
a resolution in favor of Father's Day, to establish
more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full
measure of their obligations. In 1966, President
Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order that
the holiday be celebrated on the third Sunday in
June. Under President Richard Nixon, in 1972, Congress passed an act officially making Father's
Day a national holiday. Six years later, Sonora
Smart Dodd died at age 96.