By Carol Fisher Linn
June 21 – a Double Header: Father’s Day, Summer Solstice
When looking at the calendar for June it is a bit unusual that the Summer Solstice and Father’s Day happen at the same time this year.
Dates for the solstice change, but Father’s Day is always the third Sunday in June, so the chance they will occur together is not necessarily slim, but it generally happens every five or six years. However, because of a quirk with the calendar and astrological goings on, the next time Solstice and Father’s Day share the same date will be in 2037.
By the time Father’s Day rolls around in the Eastern Hemisphere, we have already been having our bar-b-ques and enjoying many of the early summer activities (until the pool water heats up!) even though the 21st is the first true day of summer. That is, unless you are following the meteorological calendar which begins summer on June 1.
Of course, summer solstice gives us the longest day of the year, (which means the days get begin to grow shorter from here until December) not because the earth has changed its distance from the sun but because of the Earth’s axial tilt – the earth orbits the sun at a tilt to its axis.
Now, Father’s Day sits firmly on the third Sunday of June. It took a while for dad’s to be celebrated from the first informal celebration in 1910 to finally being recognized by our government when President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order in 1966 for Father’s Day to officially be celebrated on the third Sunday in June. It took another six years, in 1972, for Congress to pass an act that made Father’s Day a national holiday.