Miscellaneous Monday: What’s your favourite month of the year?

Daria Kulikova_GitProtect.io

G'day Atlassian Community!

I’ve always had a soft spot for June. For me, it’s not just the beginning of the holiday season, it’s a month full of celebrations: my birthday, our wedding anniversary, and even a bunch of my friends’ birthdays. So let’s just say... June is party time for me! 🎉

But there’s another celebration in June that has recently become meaningful to me - Father’s Day. In my country, it’s a fairly new holiday, first officially celebrated in 2019 on the third Sunday of June. This year, it falls on the 15th.

I first discovered Father’s Day about 15 years ago during my stay in the U.S. I remember walking through stores filled with “gifts for dad” promotions and wondering why we didn’t celebrate it back home. I even called my parents to ask, “Why don’t we celebrate Father’s Day?”, and they hadn’t heard of it at all.

I’m really glad it’s gained recognition in Ukraine now, because dads deserve a day too, just like moms in May. 💙 

Curious as always, I dug into the history of this celebration. Surprisingly, it dates back nearly 4,000 years to Babylon, where a young boy named Elmesu carved a Father's Day message into clay, wishing his father good health and a long life. Though the tradition faded (if it actually was a tradition), it resurfaced in the early 20th century in the U.S. Sonora Smart Dodd, inspired by Mother's Day, proposed a day to honor her father, a Civil War veteran who raised six children on his own. The idea caught on, and in 1972, Father’s Day was officially recognized as a national holiday.

Today, it’s celebrated across the globe, on different dates depending on the country. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and some other European countries, it is celebrated on he 3rd Sunday of June. In Spain and Belgium, it’s marked on March 19; in Sweden, November; and in New Zealand, it falls on the first Sunday of September.

So now I’m wondering, what’s your favorite month of the year? Or if that’s too hard to choose, what’s your favorite celebration?

Happy Monday, Community - and have a great week ahead! 🌞

Andy Gladstone

@Daria Kulikova_GitProtect_io thanks for this publish!

My favorite month of the year is October. I live in the Northeast United States and October begins with the trees all green and ends in them awash with color - reds, yellows, oranges and some browns. 

My wife and I enjoy nature hiking and biking (and can sometimes convince the kids to come with us) and the past few years we have taken time off from work to enjoy a day together during peak leaf peeping season. Sometimes it is a hike through a forest, sometimes mountain biking down trails that run along rivers and streams, but it is always calming and serene.