Third Sunday of June · 6月第三个星期日
Father's Day: a young American holiday, adopted worldwide
父亲节：一个年轻的美国节日，如今被全世界采纳
Unlike Mothering Sunday, Britain's Father's Day is a straightforward American import.
与英式母亲节不同，英国的父亲节其实是一个不折不扣的“美国进口”节日。
Father's Day has none of Mothering Sunday's church history — it's a genuinely young holiday, generally traced to a 1910 event organised in Spokane, Washington by a woman who wanted to honour her father, a Civil War veteran who raised six children alone. It took decades to catch on even in the US, and longer still to become a fixture in Britain, where it's now observed on the third Sunday of June — the same date used across most of the world.
父亲节没有母亲节那样悠久的教会历史——这实际上是一个相当年轻的节日，通常被追溯至1910年，美国华盛顿州斯波坎市的一位女性为纪念她的父亲——一位独自抚养六个孩子的南北战争退伍军人——而发起的活动。这个节日即便在美国也花了几十年才真正流行开来，传到英国就更晚了；如今英国将其定在6月的第三个星期日，与世界上大多数地区所用的日期相同。
It carries none of the older ritual baggage of Mothering Sunday: no special cake, no church visit, just cards, gifts, and family meals. Its comparative newness makes it a useful marker of how quickly a holiday can spread globally once it's commercially convenient — greetings-card companies did as much to establish the date as any organic tradition did.
它没有母亲节那样厚重的仪式传统：没有特制蛋糕，也不必去教堂，只有贺卡、礼物和家庭聚餐。它相对“年轻”的特点，恰好说明了一个节日一旦具备商业便利性，能以多快的速度传播至全球——贺卡公司在确立这个日期上，其实和任何自发形成的传统一样功不可没。
Seen from the other side · 换个角度看
Mainland China adopted the same third-Sunday-in-June date wholesale, alongside the American Mother's Day — a rare case of a Western commercial holiday being absorbed almost without local adaptation, precisely because there was no competing indigenous tradition to blend it with.
中国大陆几乎原封不动地采用了同样的“6月第三个星期日”这一日期，与美国母亲节一起被引入——这是西方商业节日几乎不经本土化改造就被直接吸纳的少见案例，原因恰恰在于中国本没有可以与之融合的固有传统。