DADS: Sunday is Father’s Day — a day set aside to celebrate the nation’s fathers. Interestingly, it took longer for it to catch on than Mother’s Day did.

We took a look at the website history.com to give us some insight into the history of Father’s Day. In 1909, Mother’s Day was observed in 45 states. In 1914, it was made a national holiday.

A day honoring the nation’s dads was a harder sell.

On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah.

The next year, a Spokane, Wash., woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support. It worked. Washington State celebrated the nation’s first Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson honored the day. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to celebrate Father’s Day. Yet it didn’t become a federal holiday until President Richard Nixon made it one in 1972.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, using 2014 data, there were an estimated 72 million fathers across the nation, and 29 million grandfathers.

In 2017, there were an estimated 24 million fathers living in married-couple family groups with children younger than 18, two million single fathers living with children under 18, and 267,000 stay-at-home dads.

Hallmark says Father’s Day is the fourth largest card-sending occasion each year, with 72 million cards given every year.

And still, the necktie is consistently the most popular gift.