Adding Mother's and Father's day into Google Calendar

Question

The Australian holidays calendar doesn't appear to include Mother's Day or Father's day. How can I add them into my calendar?

Answer 1

Apple has fantastic calendars available in iCal format:

• Australian Holiday Calendar - New South Wales (NSW) 1.0
• Australian Holiday Calendar and Key Dates - Tasmania (TAS) 1.0

Both of these say that they have Mother's and Father's Day. Since they are in iCal format, you can easily subscribe to these calendars.

Answer 2

To create events that occur annually on, say, the second Sunday of May, do this:

• Create an untimed event on May 8, 2011
• Open event details
• Change the "Repeats" value to "Monthly"
• Change to "Repeats every 12 months"
• Click the "Repeat By" radio button for "day of the week"
• Leave "Ends Never" as is

You now have a calendar event that will repeat the 2nd Sunday of May every year.

Answer 3

I assume they are omitted because they aren't national / regional holidays. You can add them to one of your personal calendars by adding them as with any other event. So that they look the same, you could create a new calender (called "Special days" or something) and make it have the same colour scheme as the built-in calendar - you'll barely notice the difference.

If you really want all these things in one calendar, I think the only way to do it is by creating your own then copying the ones from the main holidays calendar across.

In case it helps, here's the dates for the next few years (for Australia):

• 2011 - May 08
• 2012 - May 13
• 2013 - May 12
• 2014 - May 11

Looks to me like it's the second Sunday in May in Australia - you can program that in to Google Calendar (Annual recurrence on second Sunday in May). According to this page that is indeed the right way to go about it...