When is Father's Day 2025? Here's the date and origin story for the June holiday for dads

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5 days ago

It's officially June! Which means people with dads and beloved father figures will likely start shopping for golf-themed cards, outdoor gear, whiskey glasses and whatever else the dads in their lives love in the coming days. That's right, Father's Day in the U.S. is just a few weeks away.
Like Mother's Day, Father's Day always falls on a particular Sunday in June and isn't tied to a calendar date.
Here's when Father's Day 2025 falls on the calendar and how the holiday began in the U.S.
This year, Father's Day falls on Sunday, June 15, 2025.
Father's Day always falls on the third Sunday of June, which means the calendar date changes every year.
Mother's Day came first, and actually inspired Father's Day. According to History.com, the commercialized Mother's Day we know and celebrate in the U.S. today began in 1908, but its origins can be traced all the way back to the mid-1800s.
'The 'Mother's Day' we celebrate today has its origins in the peace-and-reconciliation campaigns of the post-Civil War era. During the 1860s, at the urging of activist Ann Reeves Jarvis, one divided West Virginia town celebrated 'Mother's Work Days' that brought together the mothers of Confederate and Union soldiers …' History.com says.
'In 1909, 45 states observed the day, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution that made the second Sunday in May a holiday in honor of 'that tender, gentle army, the mothers of America.''
But Father's Day took a little while longer to get off the ground, due to gender norms of the time. According to the Old Farmer's Almanac and Lawrence R. Samuel, author of 'American Fatherhood: A Cultural History," 'Men had a different role in the family during the first half of that century. It was patriarchal, so they felt that a special day to exalt fatherhood was a rather silly idea, when it was mothers who were underappreciated.'
It wasn't until 1972, under President Richard Nixon, that Congress passed an act officially making Father's Day a national holiday. But the first Father's Day celebration can be traced all the way back to 1908, around the same time Mother's Day kicked off in the U.S.
'The first known Father's Day service occurred in Fairmont, West Virginia, on July 5, 1908, after hundreds of men died in the worst mining accident in U.S. history,' the Old Farmer's Almanac says. But the observance didn't become an annual or nationally observed event.
A year later, Sonora Smart Dodd, a 27-year-old in Spokane, Washington, was inspired by Mother's Day and came up with the idea to set aside a day in June to celebrate dads.
'She proposed June 5, her father's birthday, but the ministers chose the third Sunday in June so that they would have more time after Mother's Day (the second Sunday in May) to prepare their sermons,' the almanac says.
'On June 19, 1910, the first Father's Day events commenced: Sonora delivered presents to handicapped fathers, boys from the YMCA decorated their lapels with fresh-cut roses (red for living fathers, white for the deceased), and the city's ministers devoted their homilies to fatherhood.'
The first bill to make Father's Day a holiday was presented to Congress just a few years later in 1913, but didn't pass.
Eight years later, President Calvin Coolidge signed a resolution in favor of establishing a Father's Day and in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order dictating that the holiday would be celebrated on the third Sunday of June. In 1972, Congress approved an act to make it a national holiday, under Nixon.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Father's Day 2025: Here's when, why we celebrate dads every June