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Father’s Day has been celebrated across the United States now for over a hundred years. It was an afterthought by a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, as she listened to a Mother’s Day sermon at the Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, Washington, in 1909. Why not set aside a similar day for fathers? Her own father, William Smart, had raised six children by himself after the death of his wife.

Ms. Dodd organized a Father’s Day observance on June 19 of that year. She didn’t get much support; even her hometown newspaper mocked the notion of a made-up holiday. It didn’t help that she soon allied herself with the Associated Men’s Wear Retailers, a trade group — hence the inevitable ties, the bane of many a modern dad on this day.

But by 1913, Congress was listening. The New York Times records that a bill commemorating fathers was introduced by “Representative J. Hampton Moore, who has eight children.” Perhaps with that many children, he stood more to gain.

But even Moore’s resolution couldn’t work up much originality; it called for “an expression of sentiment corresponding to that of Mother’s Day.”

It still wasn’t taken all that seriously; it wasn’t recognized as a federal holiday until President Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966.

Fathers are no afterthought, and the tie is not obligatory.

To truly put into perspective just how important good dads are in our lives, we can just take a look at recent U.S. Census Bureau stats that highlight the impact of the nearly 1 in 4 Americans living without a father in the home. Those include the children in the house being at a much greater risk of poverty, having behavioral problems and being more likely to go to prison or commit a crime.

Sunday is “Happy Father’s Day” time for the approximately 70 million fathers in the United States. In addition, it is time to remember the fathers who have passed away, yet live on in dear memory.

On one level, any man can be a father, at least as far as genetics is concerned. You have to look no further than the daily glut of daytime talk shows to find evidence of that. Pope John XXIII put it this way: “It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father.”

Real fathers, whether related to their children by blood or not, are the ones worthy of celebrating. Biology is not determinative here. Love is.

Fathers have a lot to contend with these days. They have to care for and protect their children from dangers as old as time and from modern perils as well. They have to teach their sons and daughters ethics and morals and character in a world that at times seems confused about the difference between right and wrong.

Dads must recognize that they will make mistakes in the raising of their sons and daughters, make course corrections and learn to say the words, “I’m sorry.” Children must learn to see the wisdom in their father’s heart at last and reach the point where the words attributed to Mark Twain become true: “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Above all, a father, in Shakespeare’s words, needs to “know his own child.” Because in time, every child becomes something of a stranger to his dad, as the child, one way or another, becomes a prodigal son or daughter.

When fathers have raised their kids, by hard work and good luck, to be upstanding, independent adults, they know that they have done their job.

Sunday is the day when children should take time to say “Thank you and I love you” in some way. May your Father’s Day be filled with both gratitude and love.