What My Father Taught Me About July 4th — And What I’m Passing Down
By David W. | Mission Ready Father
He passed about five years ago. But every July 4th, I feel him in the day. For our family, July 4th family traditions have always carried his memory with them.
My father was a Vietnam veteran. He loved this country the way people love something they’ve thought about carefully rather than taken for granted. Not blind pride, the earned kind. He understood America wasn’t perfect. He also understood that in comparison to everywhere else, there was no place he’d rather be for the freedom and opportunity it created for every person willing to reach for it.
What he carried, that clear-eyed appreciation for what this country means and what it asks of the people who love it, didn’t just transfer to me. It transferred to all three of his kids. My sister served. My brother served and continues serving today. Whatever my father was living and modeling in our home, it took root in all of us the same way. That’s not an accident. That’s the mark of a man who understood, without ever needing to say it directly, that what you build in your home is what your children carry into the world.
That perspective, about service, about sacrifice, about the flag, transferred without either of us planning it that way. It was just present in how he talked about this country and what it meant to be an American. By the time I was old enough to make my own choices, the question of whether to serve wasn’t really a question at all.
I joined in 1998. The world was a relatively calm place. What followed, the years after 2001, a combat deployment to Afghanistan, 20 years across two branches, shaped everything about how I understand commitment, community, and what it actually means to show up for something larger than yourself. I retired from the military last month, in May 2026, after two decades of honorable service.
I won’t pretend I’m the same idealist who raised his right hand at 18. Life and time have a way of complicating the clean narratives. But here’s what I’ve never stopped believing, and what those 20 years confirmed over and over: when people work together toward common goals, whether that’s a military unit, a neighborhood, or a family sitting on a lakeshore watching fireworks, something remarkable becomes possible. The hope of a bright future isn’t an abstraction. It’s something specific people build together, one shared moment at a time.
July 4th family traditions, to me, have always been a reminder of that. Not just as a commemoration of history, but as an annual invitation to build something in your own home, with your own family.
Here’s what July 4th family traditions have looked like across my life. And here’s how I think about building them deliberately for my kids.
What I Remember From Growing Up
I grew up in New Mexico. July 4th family traditions in our house looked a specific way when I was growing up, and the one I keep coming back to would have been 1994.
My dad had dug a pit in the yard for a campfire. That afternoon we roasted hotdogs over it, the kind of meal that tastes better outside over an open fire than anything served on a plate indoors ever could. S’mores came later. As the night went on, more wood went on the fire until what started as a campfire had quietly become a bonfire. I was fourteen and had a healthy appreciation for fire that I suspect most boys that age share. My dad understood this and managed it with the particular patience of a father who has seen this coming.
There were family and friends there. Ice cold sodas from the cooler, which was not an everyday thing in our house, which made them taste exactly the way things taste when they’re slightly out of the ordinary. The smell of woodsmoke mixing with the night air. Easy conversation among the adults. Kids running around with the kind of energy that builds all day when there’s something worth waiting for at the end of it.
And we were waiting. Specifically for the sun to go down.
In rural New Mexico, in summer, the sun does not cooperate with a fourteen year old’s impatience. It takes its time. That evening it seemed to take longer than any sun had ever taken in the history of the world. I watched the western sky the way you watch a pot that won’t boil, willing it to move faster, certain it was doing this deliberately.
When it finally went down and the stars began to emerge, something happened that I didn’t have the words for at fourteen, but I’ve thought about it many times since. We lived far enough from any city that the sky at night was something entirely different from what most people see. The elevation helped. The distance helped. And that night, as we set up the fireworks in the yard, the belt of the Milky Way was visible overhead in a way that made you stop and look up before you remembered what you were doing.
We lit the fireworks against that sky. The show kept getting bigger as the night went on, each one setting the bar a little higher for the next. The laughter got louder. The wonder kept resetting. The bonfire crackled behind us. We kept going until we ran out.
I didn’t know it then, but what I was experiencing wasn’t really about the fireworks. It was about what the fireworks created: an excuse to stand together in the dark, looking up at the same sky, feeling the same thing at the same time.
That feeling is what I’ve been chasing every July 4th since.
What July 4th Looks Like Now
We live in California now. Backyard fireworks aren’t legally an option here, though anyone who has spent a July 4th evening in a California neighborhood knows that distinction is observed with varying levels of enthusiasm by our neighbors. What I didn’t know when we moved was how much I’d miss that specific ritual. Not the fireworks themselves, but what they represented. The self-contained family production. The building momentum as the night went on. The feeling that we were creating something together.
It took a few California July 4ths to figure out that the feeling was still available. The delivery mechanism just had to change.
What I’ve learned is that the togetherness was never really about the fireworks. The fireworks were just the vehicle. And once I understood that, our July 4th family traditions opened back up too.
The July 4th I Keep Coming Back To
In the summer of 2023, my family drove to Lake Tahoe for July 4th weekend. I’ll be honest about something here. Trips like this don’t plan themselves in our house. My wife is the architect of our family’s togetherness. The Tahoe trip was her doing, as are most of the gatherings and experiences that have become the memories our family actually keeps. I show up. She builds the conditions that make showing up worth it.
And I want to say something I don’t say enough. I see it. I know it isn’t easy, the coordinating, the planning, the countless details that have to come together before any of us ever arrive somewhere and feel like everything just happened naturally. None of it happens naturally. It happens because she makes it happen. The memories our family keeps, the ones our kids will carry long after they’ve forgotten the ordinary days, exist because of her. I am grateful for that more than I usually say out loud.
My aunt and uncle live there now, in a home originally built by my great grandfather, the kind of place that carries history in its walls without announcing it. We were there to celebrate my mom’s 70th birthday, which falls right around Independence Day, and to spend the holiday together as a family.
What followed was one of those weekends that doesn’t announce itself as significant while it’s happening. It just feels right. Good food. Easy conversation. The particular comfort of being around people who have known you your entire life. My mom, turning 70, surrounded by the people who love her most.
That evening, we walked down to the shore of the lake, close enough to watch the city’s annual Lights on the Lake fireworks show light up the sky over the water. I knew what was coming. We’d been to July 4th shows before and I’d seen the excitement in my kids’ faces more than once. I was looking forward to seeing it again. What I wasn’t expecting was what it would feel like to see it there, in that moment, with my mom standing next to me turning 70, in a place that had belonged to our family for generations.
The sun had set maybe twenty minutes earlier, leaving just a hint of light creeping over the mountains to the west. Stars were already emerging overhead, more vivid than you’d see near a city, the kind of sky you only get at elevation and distance from everything. The lake was calm enough that you could hear the waves moving against the beach in a soft, steady rhythm. Around us, other families had settled in along the shore. Quiet conversations. Laughter. Kids running in the last of the fading light.
There was a stillness to it that I didn’t fully register until later. The kind of stillness that only happens when everyone present has decided, without saying so, that this is exactly where they want to be.
Then the first fireworks went up.
Standing at the water’s edge, watching the show build over the lake, I found myself looking at my kids’ faces before I looked at the sky. The light from the fireworks caught their expressions in pulses. The excitement building with each burst. The pure, uncomplicated wonder of watching something beautiful unfold right in front of you, with nowhere else to be and nothing else to think about.
And something shifted in me.
I was suddenly fourteen years old in a New Mexico backyard, watching my parents watch me. I felt what they must have felt, the specific, quiet fullness of seeing your child experience something wonderful. The understanding that this is what the whole thing is for. The moment where past and present collapse into each other and you realize that what your parents gave you, you are now giving your own children, and they will someday give it to theirs.
My mom was there. Turning 70. Watching her grandchildren’s faces in the light of the fireworks. I thought about my father, what he would have felt standing in that same moment. How he would have looked at all of us.
The fireworks kept building over the lake. Nobody said much. We just stood there together, looking up at the same sky, the waves still moving against the shore behind us.
That’s the July 4th I keep coming back to. That’s the one I’m trying to recreate, not the specific location or the specific show, but the conditions that made it possible. The deliberate choice to be together. To put everything else down and just show up for the people you love on a day that was always meant for exactly that.
What You’re Actually Building
Here is something I didn’t understand at fourteen years old in that New Mexico backyard, and something my kids didn’t understand standing on the shore of Lake Tahoe that July evening in 2023.
They don’t know they’re receiving something.
The moments that will matter most to them in their lives aren’t the ones they’ll recognize in real time. They’re the ones that will surface thirty years from now, unexpectedly, when their own lives are full and busy and complicated and someone they love is no longer there to share them. They’ll be standing somewhere, watching their own children’s faces, and something will shift. And they’ll understand, the way you can only understand something after you’ve lived long enough to feel the full weight of it, what was actually happening on that lakeshore when they were young.
What you’re building in these moments isn’t just a memory. It’s a foundation. A sense of belonging to something larger than yourself, to a family, a tradition, a shared history that existed before you and will continue after you. It’s the thing you fall back on when life gets hard, when people are gone, when the world feels disconnected and you need something solid to stand on. You don’t build it with a single moment. You build it by showing up, again and again, and choosing to gather the people you love around something worth remembering.
They don’t know it yet. But they will.
If you still have parents. If your kids still have grandparents. If the people you love are still here, still healthy, still available for a drive to the lake or a backyard with a campfire and ice cold sodas from the cooler, don’t wait for the perfect moment to gather them.
And if the July 4th weekend sparks something in you about getting outside with your kids this summer, I wrote about exactly that, the gear, the fishing setup, the campfire, and what actually happens when you stop putting it off, in Camping and Fishing With Your Kids.
The perfect moment is now, while everyone is still in it together. You don’t fully understand what you have until the people who made it possible are no longer there to be part of it.
I know this personally.
Build the moments anyway. Build them deliberately. Build them even when life is busy and the planning feels like one more thing on a list that never gets shorter.
Your kids won’t know what you’re giving them. Not yet.
But someday, they will.
What You’re Actually Building With July 4th Family Traditions
My father taught me that this country is worth loving honestly, not perfectly, not blindly, but with the kind of clear-eyed appreciation that comes from understanding what the alternative looks like. He taught me that service is one way of saying thank you for what you’ve been given. And he taught me, without ever using these words, that the people standing next to you matter more than almost anything else.
I didn’t fully understand what he was giving me while he was giving it. I understand it now.
July 4th is a holiday about independence. But the July 4th family traditions worth passing down have never really been about independence at all. But what it has always felt like to me, in a New Mexico backyard in 1994, on the shore of Lake Tahoe in 2023, and in every version of it I’m still trying to build for my own kids, is about the opposite of independence. It’s about connection. About the deliberate choice to gather, to be present, to look up at the same sky and feel the same thing at the same time.
That’s what my father passed down. That’s what I’m passing down.
Go find your shore this July 4th. Bring the people you love. Put the phones away when the fireworks start.
The rest takes care of itself.
— David W.
Coming next: The reading list that shaped how I lead, parent, and think — books worth your time at every stage of the journey.
Filed under: Parenting | Leadership | Family | July 4th | Veterans | Holidays
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