“Yes, Japan celebrates Father’s Day, known as Chichi no Hi (父の日), on the third Sunday of June every year—the same day as in the US.”
So Happy Father’s Day to you from us, as well. We see you.
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Yeah, my point was rather that if your kids are acknowledging father’s day, you are ahead of the curve.
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I thought; ‘Father’s Day, isn’t that just some American artificial holiday invented to sell ties?’
As it turns out, Iceland does have a Father’s Day, Google tells me. It dates back to 2006 and approximately no one knows about it and fewer still celebrate it.
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That was my father’s opinion, and he refused to have it celebrated in the family home.
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Happily, I had moved out before Iceland acquired a Father’s Day, not to mention that neither my father nor surviving grandfather have ever heard of this day. As I have a strict policy against any celebrations or even acknowledgements of my birthday (I try to avoid friends knowing when it is), I would, of course, strongly discourage any celebrations of a Father’s Day, if I had any offspring.
I suppose I could tell them that it was the custom of our family to not acknowledge the existence of Father’s Day, and their sacred task was to bin any print advertising referencing it, as well as turning off the TV if, somehow, a commercial should play there.
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Father’s Day here is celebrated by Father’s getting together and drinking beer as far as I’m aware. maybe they are lamenting their kids lack of awareness but maybe they are just drinking .
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I celebrate Father’s Day, both by buying my Dad a gift and getting something (and generally) doing something with my boys. And I wish my friends who are Dad’s a good day as well.
We’ve both come from families that celebrate things and I’m glad we do; it’s lovely that a few days a year to say, “I love you and I bought you this because I thought you’d like it” (although we do this all the time anyway).
I’m really lucky that we’re close and we enjoy each other’s company and do so even more now our boys are getting older.
I’m aware that Valentine’s, Mother’s and Father’s Day (and the Welsh St Dwynwens Day) are all constructs, but it’s nice to be nice.
So Happy Father’s Day to all of you who are Dads (or those who fulfill a Dad’s role).
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ObTooHot: Too hot!
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So I just found out my kids are currently unable to enter the UK. Because they are my kids, and were therefore born British, they can’t apply for the cheap and easy travel authorization that their mother can use, and instead we’ll have to pay a lot to wait months hoping that sending a stack of irreplaceable original documents by mail will result in British passports.
Such a weird situation, all because of the UK’s policy that babies born overseas who have never ever been registered in the UK are automatically British, colliding with new travel authorization requirements that they are specifically ineligible for.
Thank fuck I found this out now, and not immediately before we were due to travel!
Edit: more investigation of this, and the government seems to be constantly saying in 2026 that they widely publicised this change since 2024, and spent a lot of money doing so. How then were we able to travel to the UK without seeing or hearing this information anywhere eh?
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I read a lot about the new travel requirements here recently but mostly only AFTER people had problems because of it. I would hazard a guess that they/government “thought” they did a good job of posting about the new rules somewhere… just like our scrum master “thought” he had told us about the new requirements for writing up our hours… and then we found out on the last day of the month that we should have been putting in more info for the past month.
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That sucks
So many of the rules seem to have no tangible benefit and just make people’s lives more complicated.
I remember reading that the UK used to be really good at this, pragmatic and sensible but the political discourse here now has changed all that. Imo. Not talking politics.
Good luck getting it sorted. Our friend had a heck of a time getting a passport because the Home Office put a hyphen in the wrong place in her name
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Yeah, British citizenship by default was always a cool thing. Like, you don’t have to register anything for it, and even if someone forced you to renounce it, the British government doesn’t really recognise that and would just give it back if you asked (or something, I was never clear on the details). A backstop, a sense of security if we ever had to resettle there.
And now it’s not only not that, but Britain is suddenly a place we can’t even visit!
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I wouldn’t recommend it this week. It’s very hot and we’re mainly discussing the legal rights to wear a bin in public office.
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We recently got passports for our kids. Just in case. Like, no one knows exactly how deep this rabbit hole goes or when its deep enough.
It was stressful. The requirements are always vague and the person at the post office is telling you different rules than what is written on the pages, and you have no idea what rules the eventual processer is going to follow.
We did get our passports in the end, and we did get our important documents back.
I think we got like 10 copies of each kids birth certificate when they were born because bureaucracy is what it is.
Good luck getting home again.
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When we got my daughter her first passport, we foolishly did so on what turned out to ve the last saturday that one could do so, and still be (reasonably) sure to get it in time for the local high schools spring break, so there were massive lines, that took three hours. One of the more complcating things about children’s passports in the US is that both parents have to be present at application[1], so saturday is the only time lots of people can do it. Three hours in line at a post office with a 1 year old baby was not fun. It was very crowded and warm, and below freezing outside. There was also no toilet available, so at one point, I had to take the sprog to a nearby store.
When we eventually got the passport, it had the wrong birthdate on it. That was surprisingly easy to fix, though it took the intervention of my congressman’s office to get it done quickly enough.
1> If one of the parents is unavailable, say because they’re dead or otherwise not around, the process can be fun, at least for lovers of bureaucracy.
I have a friend who had to get a federal judge to issue an order telling the state department to give his kids a passport without their mother’s consent. She had had her parental rights removed for, well, good cause, but the state court’s paperwork isn’t good enough for the post office, even though it’s supposed to be.
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