When people have asked me, recently, whether or not this was my first Fourth of July, I’ve told them of course it wasn’t. It was my twenty-seventh Fourth of July, it was just the first time I’d seen people making such an almighty fuss over it.
Independence Day is fun. While Thanksgiving is typically American through its sentimentality, with its focus on hearth, home and family (and turkey), the Fourth finds its American-ness in its bombastic, extrovert, in-your-face, up-your-nose and down-your-throat attitude. If Thanksgiving is about motherhood and apple pie, the Fourth of July is about fireworks, hot dogs and beer. And frankly, as is so often the case here, if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined.
Local celebrations should be taken with a respectably large pinch of salt. If you dig too much into the history of these things, which one is apt to do as an outsider, it unravels spectacularly and you don’t get the best out of the celebration. In Catholic parts of Germany- the West and the South- the beginning of Lent is celebrated with parades, parties and copious amounts of alcohol, very much like Mardi Gras.
I remember seeing pupils, from a school that I worked at, parading through the streets during Karneval, as it is called in western Germany, as part of their local scout troop and all dressed as penguins.They waved their flippers at us, and we teachers waved back, and then we went to the pub. If one tried to explain this beginning with the story of Jesus having to go into the wilderness for forty days, and continued via an explanation of the ritual habits of medieval European Catholics, you will almost certainly lose the narrative thread between there and the point at which a bunch of ten-to-fourteen-year-olds parade through the centre of Limburg-an-der-Lahn, dressed as penguins .
Similarly, getting hung up on the historical background of Independence Day gets you nowhere much. Congress voted for the independence of the thirteen colonies on July 2nd, 1776. This point is one which, today, is somewhat moot. Even if not-President-quite-yet John Adams wrote to his wife:
“The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
Whoops. I’m personally devastated for the bloke. If you look at what he thought should happen, he’s absolutely bang on the money, 225 years later. But the only reason we remember this letter now is because he was two days out. You can almost hear Adams’ ghost screaming down the centuries “It was two days, two and a quarter centuries ago, you pedantic bastards!”. Or something.
What IS a slightly entertaining fact, if you are apt to be entertained by such things (in which case, welcome to the Dork Squad; we have t-shirts) is that Adams died on the fourth of July 1826, exactly fifty years (and two days) after Congress declared independence from Great Britain, and exactly fifty years after they approved the Declaration of Independence. Not only that, but his great friend and rival, Thomas Jefferson, spent the same day doing exactly the same thing, i.e. dying. Not only that, but they had been the only two signatories of the Declaration of Independence who later became President of the United States.
But this, while geekily pleasing to know, is useless on the day itself unless you want people to raise their eyebrows at you, and edge slowly away. The celebration of the Fourth of July has very little to do with the reasons to founders broke away from Britain. The day is not spent debating the meaning of liberty, decrying the excesses of absolute monarchy and denouncing taxes found to be unjust. Except possibly for the last one, but it sometimes seems that pretty much all taxation is seen as unjust in America; hardly a day goes by without somebody having a good old denounce.
In America, today, as Adams predicted, it’s a holiday spent the way a Summer holiday should be spent. His prediction was pretty darn accurate. For instance, Cayucos Community Church advertised their “Festival of Freedom, including ‘God Bless America’” for weeks in advance. There are parades held nationwide, one starting at the end of our street. The population of Cayucos goes from 3,000 to 30,000 over that weekend, as visitors come from more parade-deprived areas to get a look at ours here.
Having an opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge before it all went completely mad, we did so. We spent it at the cabin we were married at, by a usually tranquil lake which was packed with boats all trying hard to avoid one another. It was 35°C (95°F) and the chance to swim was a welcome one, even if it meant swimming through the waves created by the wakes of an unusual amount of lake traffic. There was a boat parade on the lake, however, and as you can see, some folks got deeply into the spirit of the thing.
The cabin was dolled up to the nines with flags and banners, and we baked a pretty good berry cake, which was photographed going into the oven, and looking decidedly more patriotic than when it came out, and whose recipe was therefore not included (right). The lake was illuminated by a proverbially huge firework display, whose roars echoed and reverberated (is that a tautology? Possibly. I’m not sure I care.) from the surrounding mountains. The pictures are below; do enjoy. The one thing Adams missed off his list was barbecues. It’s the done thing. His ghost almost certainly approves. We had grilled hot dogs. We’re being a bit more adventurous this weekend with baby back pork ribs prepared overnight with the following dry rub recipe, lifted from Cook’s Illustrated American Classics:
Dry Rub for Barbecue
4 tbsp. sweet paprika
2 tbsp. chilli powder
2 tbsp. ground cumin
2 tbsp. dark brown sugar
2 tbsp. salt
1tbs dried oregano
1tbs granulated sugar
1tbs ground black pepper
1tbs ground white pepper
1-2tsp cayenne pepper
Mix all these together, and store in an airtight container. Rub the mixture into the surface of the meat and allow to marinate for at least one hour before cooking. For more flavour, rub it in the day before, cover the rubbed meat in cling film and put it in the fridge overnight.
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