Ahh…the highlight of summer…the Fourth of July, Independence Day.  A lot of us Baby Boomers have such fond memories of long days at the lake, cookouts in the evening, and fireworks that night, and are creating those memories for our own children.

But the significance of the day is a celebration of our nation’s independence, which brings to mind the question: What does freedom mean to you? What would you pay for liberty? At what cost do we gain independence?

By definition, independence is freedom from dependence; exemption from reliance on, or control by, others; self-subsistence or maintenance; direction of one’s own affairs without interference; sufficient means for a comfortable livelihood.

As children, we wait impatiently for independence from parental control, and, when that is achieved, often long for that once-hated dependence when real life sets its hungry eyes upon us and we begin to pay the price for our freedom, both financially and by having to live with the consequences of our independent decisions. As adults, we long for liberty from boring jobs, stale relationships, high debt…and as we age, sometimes we look forward to freedom from pain and suffering.

So are we ever really free?

Some quotes about independence:

True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.  – Franklin D. Roosevelt

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability. – Henry Ford

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.  – George Bernard Shaw

True independence and freedom can only exist in doing what’s right. – Brigham Young

…those who would joyously march in rank and file, they have already earned my contempt, for they were given a large brain by accident when a spinal cord would have sufficed. – Albert Einstein

The price for independence is often isolation and solitude.  – Steve Schmidt

Men say they love independence in a woman, but they don’t waste a second demolishing it brick by brick. – Candice Bergen

It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing — that’s the Lord’s test.  – Mahalia Jackson

So on this Independence Day, take a moment and reflect on what freedom means to you, both as an American and an individual. We may never actually achieve true freedom from any and all, but as they say, it is not the destination, it is the journey.

You can now view Lifestyles of Denton County online!

Springtime in Denton!
- Denton Redbud Festival
- Community Takes on The Fight: Relay For Life
- Looking Inside: Equine Thermography

Click here to view the current issue.

Ahh, Spring…the hint of it is in the air!  The Denton Festival calendar is filled, the horses are foaling, Mardi Gras beads abound. Everyone is cleaning the sand and chemicals off their vehicles, making up missed schoolwork from those housebound ice days, and can’t wait until this awful winter we have had is officially over.

But wait…Why are we so anxious to be rid of one season and to jump into another? Yes, North Texas springtime is beautiful, but it is also fleeting.  We seem to go directly from cold to hot within a week or two.  And wasn’t it only a few months ago that we were saying, “We can’t wait until it’s cooler, these hundred degree days are just too hot; we can’t wait until it’s Christmas shopping season so we don’t melt going to and from our cars; we can’t wait until it’s cold enough to have a hot, steaming bowl of chili”?

Why is it the human condition that we are anxious and impatient for what is not currently happening?  And why is our memory so selective?  Is it the nature of the beast to want what we don’t have, forgetting that we might not want it once we have it?

One type of selective memory is “representativeness,” which is a mental shortcut that causes us to give too much weight to recent evidence and too little weight to the evidence from the more distant past. Narcissists suffer from cognitive distortions, among them selective amnesia, which allows them to eventually believe the lies they tell that cast them in a positive light. It has been said that if women remembered exactly what childbirth felt like, no second children would be born, so selective memory plays a part in population growth.

And our impatience for change drives us forward, but is it an effective motivator?  Change is inevitable, so why can’t we wait?  So often parents “can’t wait” until the children are grown and gone, then become empty nesters who “can’t wait” to see them again at holidays.  We “can’t wait” for retirement, then find ourselves bored and wishing for the everyday work interactions we presently “can’t wait” to escape.  Northerners “can’t wait” for summer; Southerners “can’t wait” for cooler weather.

Some wise words from an anonymous philosopher: “Fight the growing urge to speed up your life – what you think you want in your life may already be happening right now, but you’re not able to notice it because you’re so concerned with what is coming next.  It isn’t that difficult to live in the moment – just slow down, and think about what is happening today, not tomorrow.  Going faster doesn’t mean you will get to the good stuff more quickly.  It just means that you will abandon the good stuff you already have even faster.”

That said, barring one more freak ice storm (which we have had in the past as late as April), it’s springtime in North Texas…enjoy it while you can!

Taryn McColpin is Newsletter Editor for Denton ABATE, the local Motorcyclists Rights Organization.  For more information on joining, or on rides and events, call 940-595-1144.

by Taryn McColpin

Ahh, here we are in 2011…The holidays are over, New Year’s celebrations have come and gone, the bills are rolling in, but what a lot of Texans are lamenting is the looming end of football season.  (Of course, for Cowboys fans, the season was pretty much over in October, but that’s another story.)

We did have a great baseball season, with Your Texas Rangers finally going to the World Series as the AL Champions.  And the Mavs and Stars are enjoying winning seasons, as of this writing. The biggest news for Denton was two of our hometown high school football teams going to State Championships, representing our city with a whole lot of heart, and making us all proud.

It’s a puzzle as to why football is so big in Texas…Is it because EVERYTHING is bigger in Texas?  Is it because Texas (and much of the South) still promote young men being strong and competitive? Is it because there was such a large number of football players in the 70’s who were from Texas that people in Texas think every high school game could have a player who will be the next big thing? Is it the Cowboys Mystique?

This year, the Super Bowl will be played at Cowboys Stadium, aka Jerry World, or as the sports radio station The Ticket calls it, the Death Star.  It has indeed been deathly for the Cowboys this year, with a home record of 2-6, and someone heard Jerry say he built a billion dollar party tent where we can celebrate our losses. Since the Super Bowl “home team” this year will be the NFC Champions, it might be a good bet to wager against them, since their “home stadium” will be the Death Star.

Some interesting facts about the Super Bowl: No network footage exists of Super Bowl I. It was taped over, supposedly for a soap opera. Super Bowl Sunday is the second-largest U.S. food consumption day, following Thanksgiving, with most of those munchies being guacamole (8 million pounds!) and chips.

Super Bowl Sunday is also the 8th biggest beer-selling occasion in our country. More drivers are involved in alcohol-related accidents on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day of the year (except St. Patrick’s Day), according to the Insurance Information Institute. Six percent of Americans call in sick the Monday after Super Bowl, and on that same Monday, antacid sales increase by twenty percent.

The NFL pays for up to 150 rings for the winning Super Bowl team at $5,000 apiece, and (how sportsmanlike of them!) 150 pieces of jewelry for the losing Super Bowl team, each costing up to half the price of the Super Bowl ring.  Jostens, with a facility right here in Denton, is the manufacturer of 28 of the Championship jewelry lines.

It used to be that the Super Bowl, and football in general, was a man’s game, and the womenfolk took that Sunday opportunity to go shopping or have a girl’s day out.  Nowadays, females make up to 44% of the NFL fan base, so we do our own share of beer drinking and commercial watching in front of the TV that evening.

Given the consumer-driven excess that day, while we can’t cheer for our poor Cowboys this year, we can still take heart in the knowledge that we are giving our poor economy a boost.  So on February 6th, cuddle up in front of the fire (or the AC, as the case may be here in Texas) and enjoy Dallas’ first entry into the Super Bowl record books. Maybe we can set a new record for guacamole eating!

Holiday Open House In Downtown Denton
November 13th  •  10:00 am – 6:00 pm  and November 14th •  1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Historic Downtown Denton, 110 W. Hickory Street
Downtown retailers and restaurants welcome you to a stress-free holiday shopping weekend. Merchants provide refreshments to shoppers while they stroll through the stores finding deals. And, restaurants invite you to take a break from the shopping to enjoy some delicious deals on meals over the weekend.

Beaujolais and More
November 18th  •  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm  •  Denton Civic Center
Wine tasting and gourmet food, with proceeds benefiting the Campus Theater.

Denton Holiday Lighting Festival
December 2nd  •  5:30 pm – 9:00 pm  •  Denton Courthouse-on-the-Square Lawn
22nd Annual kicks off with a sing-along and the lighting of the community Christmas tree. Twinkling lights, choirs, bell-ringers, dancers and the aroma of spicy hot cider will transport the child in you to memories of Christmas past. Take a spin in a horse-drawn wagon, have your child’s photo taken with Santa, or participate in interactive arts and crafts activities that will forge memories for the entire family.  Be a part of the true meaning of the holidays by bringing an unwrapped toy for the Denton Community Toy. All toys collected during the festival will be distributed to area families in Denton County.  Don’t miss Denton’s Grammy Award winning band, Brave Combo for their “chicken dance” on the Courthouse lawn while they introduce new local musicians to the event. It’s only one evening, but you will remember it forever!

During the Holiday Season, downtown shops will be open for extended hours in the evening and Sunday afternoons.

by Taryn McColpin

Ahh, October…The month of Harvest and Halloween, pumpkins and parties, fall and food.

Surprisingly, the fall month most associated with food is not November, but October. What first comes to mind is the bags full of candy we collect on the last day of the month for most of our childhoods, but many Halloween traditions are associated with actual food.

Samhain, the Celtic harvest festival, is one of the origins of Halloween as we know it. In the first century, the Romans adopted some Celtic practices as their own, and Samhain was assimilated into celebrations of other October Roman traditions, such as their day to honor Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, which might explain the origin of our modern tradition of bobbing for apples on Halloween, as the Romans were fond of dunking as a torture device, which carried through to our Salem days.

Trick-or-treating is thought to have originated with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more jelly sandwiches the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to ensure the donors’ deceased relatives a quick trip to their just rewards.

Halloween customs were brought to America in the 1840’s by Irish immigrants fleeing their country’s potato famine. The Jack-o-lantern probably comes from Irish folklore, although the original carved vegetables were usually gourds or turnips, which don’t make very good pies. They were left on the doorstep to ward off spirits, sometimes with treats to avoid the spirits’ tricks. Trick-or-treating has somehow morphed into setting fire to the village of Detroit, but at that time, the favorite pranks in New England included tipping over outhouses (hopefully uninhabited) and unhinging fence gates.

During October, many foods are in season, including all the root crops, and the squash family, such as the venerable pumpkin, nuts and berries, apples and pears and peppers…plus oysters (since it is a month with an R) and the beginning of Archery Only hunting season on October 2 (where the hunters bring home venison, goose, partridge, and empty cases of beer).

In Canada, they get a foodie jump on us by celebrating Thanksgiving on October 11. Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, the biggest Harvest festival of them all, is September 18-October 4. Early Oktoberfest celebrations were, naturally, held in October, but the festival was eventually moved to September, as the weather was better earlier in the fall, a sentiment with which we Texans can empathize.

In the USA, almost all food-related special days are referred to as “National,” whether they have been declared so officially or not. We Americans like our food…and it shows. We start out healthy, with World Vegetarian Day on October 1st; however, Pudding Season begins on that day as well. Sweetest Day is the third Saturday in October, and we also have National Taco Day, National Dessert Day (and Chocolate Covered Insect Day), National Pasta Day, and National Nut Day. And on October 30 is a National Day for candy corn, which amazingly is fat-free, but serves its Halloween purpose by making people scream when they step on the scale after indulging in a bag or two of the stuff.

National Chili Week is October 3-9, followed logically by American Beer Week. October is Pickled Pepper Month, Pizza Month, Popcorn Poppin’ Month, and Eat Country Ham Month, among many others. The puzzling part about this is that October is also Hunger Awareness Month.

So contribute to your local Food Bank on World Food Day, October 16th, pass out jelly sandwiches for Halloween if you have any pesky ghosts you wish to rush along to their final destination, and make sure there are no stray Romans behind you when you are dunking for apples.