FATHER’S DAY FLOWER. You read that correctly, Father’s Day once held a tradition of daughters handing red roses to their fathers during a church service. In the early 1900s, when the holiday was in its infancy, it was customary for children to wear roses pinned to their clothing to further honor their fathers — a red rose for a still-living father or a white rose for the deceased.

Another random, yet surprising Father’s Day fact is that several presidents individually recognized Father’s Day, even before the federal government did. As stated in Friday’s RTS, the federal government didn’t recognize Father’s Day as an official holiday until 1972! Even though former United States president Woodrow Wilson commemorated Father’s Day in 1916, he never signed a proclamation to recognize it as a national holiday. Then in 1924, president Calvin Coolidge urged individuals and states to recognize Father’s Day, but failed to ever officially implement the holiday — so Father’s Day remained an unofficial holiday for several decades.

Although it took awhile to be officially recognized in the U.S., Father’s Day is big business in today’s commercial marketplace. According to the greeting card company Hallmark, Father’s Day is the “fourth most popular holiday for exchanging cards, with approximately 72 million flying off shelves annually.” According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), Americans are expected to spend approximately $20 billion on gifts for Dad — yet, Father’s Day still falls under the shadow of Mother’s Day retail expenditures. This year on Mother’s Day the NRF found that Americans spent a whopping $31.7 billion on gifts for Mom.

In the 1920s there was a brief movement in NYC to stop the “division of respect and affection” and to instead join Mother’s and Father’s Day into one holiday, as a unified Parent’s Day, according to children’s radio entertainer Robert Spere.