We celebrate many holidays in America.

Memorial Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, Presidents Day and I am sure I am omiting a few days that bring us all together for various celebrations.

But none is like The Fourth.

We don’t refer to any of the holidays I listed by their date. We don’t say, for instance, “What are your plans for the 25th or the 31st. Some of our most traditional holidays no longer have a set date for their celebration.

But we all know about The Fourth.

So ingrained in our American consciousness that we no longer have to specify the Fourth of July, The Fourth is the most American of Holidays that politics has yet to besmirch.

The Fourth represents our sacred past and new beginning. But it’s the past I wish to address this morning…my past and how The Fourth was viewed by young kids growing up in the shaddows of World War II.

Born in the Bronx in 1950, just five years after the cessation of WWII hostilities, my friends and neighbors living on Leland Avenue (if you read A Bronx Boy’s Tale, you know about my friends and Leland Avenue) The Fourth was a special day indeed.

Neighbors would gather in front of their respective apartment buildings, setting up tables and coolers for the evening’s festivities.

Fathers would sip a Ballantine or Rheingold beer, and mothers would adorn their tables with salads and sandwiches, and kids would steal pretzels and potato chips from unattended snack bowls. If it was hot, it was not stifling so.

As evening morphed into night, sparklers were distributed to the kids. Later, the heavy-duty artillery would be entrusted to the fathers who would set up soda bottles to serve as launch pads for our favorite sky rockets. Other fireworks, including Helicopters, Roman Candles, and plain old firecrackers, would add to our explosive delight.

Safety was always a concern, and mothers made sure their children were out of harm’s way despite our desperate yearnings to be part of the action.

We didn’t watch TV or read a newspaper because we knew all that was needed to be known about The Fourth.

It was said that The Fourth was the official beginning of the summer, but we all remembered that it was also the official beginning of America.

We didn’t have to say, July 4th, or the 4th of July to remember the importance of the day.

We merely had to say The Fourth and that was all you had to know.

It was our special day.

It was our special holiday.

It may, in fact, have been our one and only American Holy Day.

It certainly is a day to pray and rejoice.

God Bless The United States Of America!