Father’s Day: understand the origin of the date celebrated in Brazil this Sunday (13)

This year’s Father’s Day, which will be celebrated this Sunday (13), will mark the seventieth year in which the date is celebrated in Brazil.

The first record of the celebration in the country dates back to 1953 and, like other commemorative dates, such as Rock Day and Valentine’s Day, it came about due to an advertising campaign.

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Father’s Day arrived in Brazil as the idea of ​​publicist Sylvio Bhering, who, at the time, worked as director of the newspaper “O Globo” and “Rádio Globo”, in Rio de Janeiro.

“For the first time, Father’s Day will be celebrated tomorrow. For the first time, the children, in the tender recognition they owe to those who dedicate energy and care, concerns and hopes to their parents, will show their parents the full extent of their love”, writes the text on page 1 of the August 15, 1953 edition of the newspaper. .

“It will be the first time and it will not be the last. So fair is the tribute, so universal and moving was the enthusiasm that welcomed it, so much do parents represent to the hearts of their children that it can be said with conviction that the initiative of O Globo and Rádio Globo will bear fruit over the years in an annual party of love,” the ad continued.

According to the institutional records on the publication’s memory website, the date celebrated in 1953 was August 16 because “it coincided with the Day of São Joaquim, father of Our Lady and considered patriarch of the family”.

In the following years, in analogy to Mother’s Day, celebrated on the second Sunday of May, Father’s Day began to be celebrated on the second Sunday of August.

Internationally, the celebration is more closely linked to the third Sunday of June, the date on which Father’s Day has been celebrated in the United States for over 100 years, since 1910. South Africa, Argentina, Canada, Chile, France, Japan, Mexico, United Kingdom and others adopt this date.

The American origin of the date comes from Sonora Luise Smart, daughter of a farmer who fought in the Civil War, who wanted to honor her father, William Jackson. The first celebration took place on William’s birthday, on June 19. After the spread of the date, the then President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, made the third Sunday of June official in 1966 as Father’s Day, and President Richard Nixon, in 1972, made it a national holiday.

Under the influence of the Catholic Church, some countries adopt March 19, the day of Saint Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary. Among them are Portugal, Spain, Italy and Bolivia.

There is no definitive historical record for the emergence of the celebration. In tradition, according to the newspaper “O Globo”, the origin comes from Babylon, 2,000 years BC, when the son of King Nebuchadnezzar would have sculpted a card in clay wishing his father luck, health and long life.