Father’s Day and Summer Solstice is on the same day this 2021! Father’s Day is on the longest day of the year. To celebrate this Father’s Day and Summer Solstice, I have five fun facts for both of them.
Father’s Day
- Father’s Day was founded on June 19, 1910, in Spokane, Washington by Sonora Smart Dodd. Sonora did this to honor her father, Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, for all his efforts as a single parent raising his six children.
- According to Hallmark, Father’s Day is the fourth-largest card-sending occasion with 72 million cards given every year.
- Today’s fathers spend double the amount of time they spent with their kids in 1989, and almost triple the amount of time with their kids as fathers did back in 1965.
- A.A. Milne created Winnie the Pooh for his son, Christopher Robin. Pooh was based on the teddy bear Christopher received for his first birthday as well as a bear named Winnie at the London Zoo they would frequent on their father/son visits. Pooh comes from the name of Christopher’s pet swan.
- Did you know that there is an official flower for Father’s Day? The official flower is a rose.
Summer Solstice
- The term “solstice” comes from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). At the solstice, the angle between the Sun’s rays and the plane of the Earth’s equator (called declination) appears to stand still.
- The longest day in history was measured in 1912. The day lasted 24 hours and about four milliseconds.
- At noon in areas along the Northern Tropics, shadows cannot be seen.
- In ancient Europe, the solstice is celebrated with a festival known as Litha. The festival involved rolling giant wheels lit on fire into bodies of water to symbolize the balance between fire and water.
- Thousands of people each year gather at Stonehenge to watch the sunrise on the solstice.
Photo by Josh Willink from Pexels
