What We've Been Up To: Fall Traditions

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Fall Traditions

Every year we have several fall traditions that we enjoy as a family together. One of the things is we usually go to Mexico with our paternal side of the family for the week prior to Halloween. We make an effort to enjoy the season though by carving pumpkins before we leave. For the first time this year, the kids were allowed to carve their own artwork. Daddy carved a tuna into his pumpkin, my little prince carved a scary face and my princess carved shapes into hers.

When we get back (usually on the day of or before Halloween) we do final touches on our costumes and take our pumpkins up to the forest for the woodland creatures to feast upon at night. They never last more than a couple days, depending on the weather, so something out there enjoys them. I remember seeing the zoo leaving pumpkins in the cages for the animals to play with in the fall. We have seen the bears feast on them, the hippos demolish them and the elephants toss them like balls. That's what I like to think happens to our masterpieces... well, except it's probably not hippos... I hope.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.
-Theodore Roosevelt