My Favorite Fourth of July Memory

Thinking back to past Fourth of July’s, the best memories I have are from my early years when I was around 10 years old. My older sister has a paper route. Every year the newspaper would award prizes to the kids who collected new subscriptions. My sister and I rode our bikes to the grocery store and asked the people as they came out if they would like a subscription. We got quite a few to sign up one year. Afterwards we rode our bikes home and looked through the prize book. Our goal was a giant collection of fireworks. There were rockets, whistlers, sparklers, ground flowers, smoking snakes, all sorts of fascinating things.

Along with the prize, we used our own money from newspaper tips and chore money to buy even more fireworks from the local stand. That Fourth of July it took hours to light all of the fireworks that we had collected. The whole family had a great time watching the show in our cul-de-sac. That was the best Fourth of July that I remember. What made it even more special was that we kids worked hard and earned the money to buy the fireworks ourselves. It gave us a great sense of accomplishment and pride and was something that we could share as a family. Even though our money was burned up in a few hours the memories will last a lifetime.