Father's Day 2017: Google releases Cactus Daddy doodle to commemorate occasion

Google has released a doodle on Sunday commemorating Father’s Day. The doodle portrays an anthromorphic cactus father nurturing his children. The doodle comprises six panels which spell out the word Google as is the pattern in many of the company’s doodles. One panel depicts the father combing the child’s hair (which is actually a flower), another has him and the child playing with a balloon, yet another has him shaving with his kid and the last one portrays the four of them as a happy family. [caption id=“attachment_3708937” align=“alignnone” width=“1000”] Google doodle for Father’s Day 2017. Image courtesy: Google[/caption] Google has commemorated this occasion in multiple years with the first one going back to 2000. That doodle was a simple one in which the first ‘o’ of Google had a hat and the ‘g’ wears a tie. Every year, the third Sunday of June is celebrated as Father’s Day in India. This year, it falls on 18 June. The occasion complements similar celebrations of family members, such as Mother’s Day, Siblings Day and Grandparents Day. The day is usually celebrated with children giving gifts like greeting cards, books, flowers, clothes, electronic gadgets etc. to their fathers. Father’s Day is celebrated on different days in different countries. India follows the North American tradition of celebrating it on the third Sunday of June. Some South American nations as well as a few European ones celebrate it on this day too. The origin stories of Father’s Day vary but one of them involves a woman named Grace Golden Clayton from Fairmount, West Virginia, according to The Sun. She was an orphan whose father had died in a mining accident. She then had lobbied her local Methodist church ministers for a church service to honour fathers in 1908. The service then morphed to become an annual celebration of fathers. Vox gives another origin story which involves an American woman, Sonora Dodd who along with her five siblings were raised by a single father in a time when that was largely uncommon. In 1910, she started a petition to recognize holiday celebrating fathers. The third Sunday of June was recognised as such by both US legislation and Presidential proclamation. Interestingly, Father’s Day is spelt with the apostrophe before the ’s' because then it belongs to each individual father. If the apostrophe was after the ’s’ then it would belong to all fathers as a collective. Also, Mother’s Day sees a bigger spike in the retail gifting industry compared to Father’s Day, according to the Vox report.