For July Fourth fun, point her away from the fireworks fanatics and let her eat cake
July Fourth has to be one of my favorite holidays. I’m going to be upfront and confess that it has less to do with patriotism and more about the food. It also has a lot to do with the fact that I’m kind of lazy.
As holidays go, the Fourth of July is easy breezy. You plan an outdoor activity that usually includes water and then throw some food on a grill.
There’s also the classic flag sheet cake as a dessert. Personally, I’m OK with the strawberries and blueberries as the stars and the stripes. It’s a classic. But my favorite flag cake is less fruity and more buttercream icing forward. As in, so much buttercream that it’s threatening the structural integrity of the paper plate the slice of cake has been placed on.
The only time my Fourth of July celebrations have been kind of ugh is when I’ve been forced to share the day with people who don’t embrace my Independence Day aesthetic. Which, just to review, is laid back with a water focus and features lots of good cake. White cake from a box is good.
Sorry, but I feel like I had to do a box cake shout-out because I’ve had some bad cake on July Fourth. The worst was at a party where the host served a “traditional” cake made from a colonial recipe. Props for sticking to a 1776 theme but the pound cake tasted like eating honey-soaked sand.
That said, I would gleefully eat honey-soaked sand over attending a Fourth of July celebration with a cult of competitive fireworks fanatics.
One year I was an eyewitness to relatives, one with three missing fingers (or was it three missing fingers between the five of them, because I think one second cousin twice removed might have been missing a finger and a half?) trying to outdo each other with their fireworks displays as I feared for the safety of a one mile stretch of planet Earth.
Sure, we were out in the country and two great aunts were manning garden hoses as a precautionary measure, but I’ve never seen such a blatant disregard for the properties of fire and explosives in my entire life.
I left, as in grabbed my children and ran, soon after this group of pyros invited all the kids to join in the fun with bottle rockets.
This Independence Day outing ties with the time a woman said she “wanted to fight me” at a Fourth of July concert. Mind you this was a symphony concert that was playing as the fireworks went off. So not exactly an event where one would expect a throw-down.
The trouble with this woman and her besties started when they were playing music on their phones over the symphony. Who does that? At the very least put on headphones if you don’t like the “1812 Overture.”
My response to this was to initiate some expert level side-eye. The side-eye grew more intense when this woman took a foot file, you know the kind to remove calluses, out of her bag and started sawing away at her feet, jettisoning foot funk into the atmosphere.
At this point I felt in the interest of public health I had to shake my head at her while side-eyeing. The next thing I knew I was being “invited” to fight.
Thankfully John Philip Sousa came to my rescue because the symphony started playing “Stars and Stripes Forever” and this distracted the woman enough that I was able to disappear into the crowd as I silently declared my independence from morons.
The only thing that calmed me down from this encounter was going home and eating a huge slice of flag cake. Consider that my pursuit of happiness.
Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.
