Celebrate Today

Sunday, July 5, 2026

Saturday, July 4, 2026

Happy Birthday, America!

some wonderful words from Winn Collier for the 4th of July today:

Happy Birthday, America!💕🤍💙

Boy, I love ya. Sometimes you break my heart, but isn’t this a sign of passion and love?

At our house, on birthdays, we go around the table and each person shares something we’re grateful for about the one blowing out the candles. I like this tradition. Gratitude makes us better people. Gratitude even changes the air a little, opens things up that seemed closed, or lost. I want more of all this.

America, I want to say something simple, but this is close to my heart. Thank you for being my home. Thank you for giving me a large story and big values to try to live up to. Thank you for being a place which has sheltered my family and given us dreams about freedom and justice and self-sacrifice, ideas so ingrained in us they shape how we imagine ourselves and our future without even recognizing. Thank you for welcoming and sheltering so many people from so many far reaches, so many who are now part of us. I love how our best moments have always been when you’ve reminded us to have open arms.

I’ve had a chance to roam pretty much from sea to shining sea, and goodness, you’re gorgeous. Some places I enjoy more than others, but I’ve never been to a single city or country mile where there wasn’t beauty. I like all the red parts and the blue parts, and all (well, most) of the people which make it so. We’re a mess, but we haven’t completely given up on each other. I sure hope we never do.

I’m grateful for apple fritters and college football (Clemson and Baylor most of all) and independent bookstores and ice cream trucks that play the ditty that makes all the kids in the neighborhood come running. Since my son is, for reasons I cannot comprehend, a fan, I’ll even say I’m grateful for the Yankees. I’m grateful for the Blue Ridge Mountains and St. George Island and that little neighborhood in Portland where I couldn’t stop smiling. Santa Fe and Chicago and Birmingham and Boston, you’re something.

Thank you, South Carolina and Virginia, for giving us our boys and so many amazing years of marriage and family and such good friends. Thank you, Colorado, for being where Miska said “yes” (the first time), and then the place where two young kids started to get a sense of what they were about, and for those mountains I must return to in order to return to myself. Thank you, Texas, my first and oldest place. Thank you for remaining the bastion of brisket and for nurturing large-hearted, salt of the earth people and for remaining deep in my soul.

So, America, when I say thank you for being my home, I’m pulling on all these threads and a thousand more. I have a lump in my throat as I’m writing. 250 years is quite a stretch. We have a history, and some of it’s shameful—but there’s been far more gifts. And we always get a chance to mend our mistakes, isn’t that something great to aim for? I hope we’ll keep moving toward the dream. I hope you don’t give up on us. I’m not giving up on you.