I love this manicure from Nailside: 4th of July nails.

I did a similar manicure last year: Pick Me! » Patriotic Fingernails

I love this tutorial on how to make a patriotic cake:

You can see the full list of ingredients on the Lifehacker website:

• Lifehacker: How to Make an American Flag Cake for the 4th of July

Ingredients:

• Two vanilla cake mixes (although you might want to get a third just in case you screw something up or want to make a bigger cake), plus any ingredients those mixes call for. You can make the cake from scratch, but we tried it that way this year and it tasted like a sugary egg sponge. Using a mix is faster and it tasted much better to us.

• Two Three containers of vanilla frosting. Any standard-sized store brand will do. (You won’t need all the frosting in both containers, but you’ll need more than one.)

• One bottle of red food dye and one bottle of blue food dye. It’s a little troubling, but you’ll use it all up.

• 8″ or 9″ cake pans, depending on how much cake you’re going to get out of the cake mix you bought. (Most cake mixes can make two 9″ cakes, so you should be fine either way.)

• A 4″ cookie tin top (or anything that can cut an even 4″ circle out of cake).

I saw this last year and it made me want to make the cake, but I had seen it AFTER the fourth of July, so maybe this year!

I snapped this photo of a little boy wishing he could buy fireworks at the local fireworks trailer last year in Arco, ID. It was such a beautiful moment for me.

Watching him look at the fireworks so longingly reminded me of my childhood experience of the Fourth of July. My family was Jehovah Witness, so I wasn’t allowed to celebrate the birth of our nation. I felt a pathetic longing every time I heard the cracks and whistles of fireworks going on outside our house while I tried to sleep. I felt guilty every time I enjoyed seeing fireworks lit by other families on the street.

That little boy, hanging out at the fireworks trailer, wishing beyond hope that he could buy some represents EXACTLY how I felt every year during Independence Day.