I just received a call from a good Dutch friend asking what I was doing to celebrate the 4th of July and I realised that I haven’t celebrated America’s Birthday in years.

During our first year living overseas (we were in Paris at the time), my husband and I would turn up our noses at French food for one day of the year to go to Planet Hollywood on the Champs-Élysées with a couple of American friends.   We’d celebrate with an orgy of fried foods, laughter and music so loud that we had to shout to hear one another.  

My own independence day
I remember another year in Paris when we went to a 4th of July Party/Going Away Party for an American friend who was returning to the States.  The party was held on a roof top terrace overlooking the Eiffel Tower and then just a few weeks later we sat on a 5th floor fire escape on Rue Reynaud overlooking Trocadero watching the Bastille Day fireworks display with an Englishman, a Frenchman and a Chinese woman.  That year somehow the two events merged in my mind as my very own Independence Day celebration – a melding of the American me and my French sensibilities. Maybe that was the year that I started to become an “international citizen”.  

The following year, the 4th of July happened as if it were any other day.  It wasn’t that I forgot to celebrate it.  It was just that without the makeshift stalls selling firecrackers at the edge of town, or the American flags waving from front porches, I simply wasn’t reminded of the holiday!  

As American as Apple Pie
The 4th of July is as American as apple pie, baseball, parades, back-yard BBQs, red and white chequered tablecloths and ants invading the picnic!  The date technically commemorates the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, but it is much more than a federal holiday.  In all the parades, fireworks and enthusiasm, Independence Day defines the American Spirit.  

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