There’s something off about walking down the aisle of Father’s Day cards. Every year, the same jokes about drunk people, bad driving, and being useless in general pile up on the racks. You take one, smirk a little, and put it back. You might laugh. If you’re being honest, you might have had a vague feeling that you could have done better.
One story this Father’s Day was able to put that small, nagging feeling into words. It wasn’t an essay or a campaign speech; it was just a bunch of cards saved over decades by a dad who never said much but kept everything.
At first, word of the story spread slowly. A son found a shoebox while going through his late father’s things. Inside were all of the Father’s Day cards he had ever sent his dad, from the scrawls he made with crayons as a child. All of them were kept by his dad. Put away but kept. He didn’t expect much when he wrote about it online. What happened next was the kind of response that the internet doesn’t usually get right: real, raw emotion from strangers who saw something true in that shoebox.
The story may have gone viral so quickly because it touched on something people hadn’t quite named yet. As a cultural event, Father’s Day has never felt as strong as it should. Mother’s Day cards tend to be sweet and sincere. A lot of Father’s Day cards are funny. Chief creative officer at The Or, Charlene Chandrasekaran, put it simply: a picture of a pint of beer doesn’t quite have the same warmth as a thoughtful message to a mother. A lot of people carry that gap between how they feel about their dads and what they give them in return in silence.
The Or, a creative company that works on its own, teamed up with CALM, a charity in the UK called Campaign Against Living Miserably, to directly address this gap. More than 30 artists redesigned Father’s Day cards by getting rid of the lazy stereotypes and adding something more honest in their place. The results are powerful not because they are emotional, but because they are honest. Thanks, without the joke to change the subject.
It may not seem important at first, but this is very important. More and more people are talking about men’s mental health, and for good reason. In the UK, suicide is still the main reason men under 50 die. Most suicide deaths are men (75% of all suicide deaths). There is an old belief that men should handle hard times in silence. This belief is slowly fading but is still there. The expectation of being “strong and silent” doesn’t just stop people from showing how they feel. Some men feel like they can’t ask for help at all because of it.
CEO of CALM Simon Gunning said something that made me think: he tells his kids every day that he loves them, and they love him back. That sentence shouldn’t stand out. It does, though. Because that kind of honesty wasn’t shown to many fathers and sons. It was always just a little off from what you were supposed to say.
The Father-Son card collection story hit home because it showed that the feeling had always been there, kept in a shoebox and acknowledged but never quite said out loud. The dad never said, “I kept every card you gave me.” He kept them. In a way, that said it all.
A shift is happening, but it’s happening slowly and unevenly. Cards aren’t very big. But little things add up. The auction for the redesigned CALM cards, which starts at £25 each, is raising money for services that save lives. Another thing that the story that went viral brought up was the fact that fathers feel more than people usually give them credit for, and that people who love them often feel more than they can say.
