That’s right, we’re doing my first-ever reaction post to my own post. I’m sure it’s been done before, but this is exciting for me, because I get to refresh you memory about my Mother’s Day post, all while celebrating the fathers in our lives.

Even better for me, because Father’s Day is a very short 3 days away, so there is still time for you to reflect on this holiday before it happens, and hopefully do something meaningful for all the dads you know.

In anticipation of writing this post, I did basically nothing for research, and at first I thought maybe it was because I was tired from the work day, or maybe it was because my girlfriend is working out of town for the summer or maybe it’s because I was scared to write about Father’s Day because we don’t communicate with our dads very easily anymore.

I’m going to share a commercial with you dear readers. This time it won’t be a satire of Mother’s Day, because all of the comedy channels seem just as ill-prepared as I am for this holiday.

See, I promised something of a mirror post, and so far so good.

The ad we just watched explicitly pointed out how disconnected we are from our families, how little time we all appear to be spending on communication and teachable moments.

Dads have always been shown to be the solid figures in our lives, whether they are there for us or not, they are stoic in their presence and reliable. But this Gillette ad uses emotions to prove that all over the world children are leaning more and more on the internet for sage wisdom and less on one of their best real-world teachers, their dads.

I have a theory that the reason why the first few things that come up when you type “Father’s Day” into Google are gift ideas is that we don’t give our dads the real gifts that they would like communication and intimacy. When you go and ask your dad for advice, your giving him an opportunity to share knowledge with you and impart some of his own personality.

A poorly kept secret is that most everyone you and I know will admit that dads are hard to shop for, but while it’s true that many of them don’t want a gift, it’s because they would much rather have an experience with you.

Another reason why I personally think Father’s Day takes a backseat is because it was invented to complement Mother’s Day. And on top of that when Father’s Day initially took off, it only received attention through the promotion of it’s founder Sonora Smart Dodd. When she left to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1920s, the holiday faded away.

When Dodd returned to her home town of Spoke in the 1930s, she began to promote the holiday again, this time focusing her efforts and raising awareness at a national level, so that it finally stuck in the United States.

Because we never gave fathers a holiday that was uniquely theirs we assumed that they would figure out how the want to celebrate it. The problem with this logic is that both mothers and fathers are wired to give more than receive after they have children, assuming they are healthy. If we want to celebrate our fathers properly we might need to turn inward and focus on them as individuals, rather than as symbols.

But that’s just a theory.

What do you think? Have I finally gone over the edge? Leave some comments below!  Share! Subscribe! Otherwise, I’m out of theories for the week, I think I’ll take a break and wind down for my own fathers Father’s Day celebrations.

Tim!