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I used to think that if Stanhope was its own country, its national holiday would be Watermelon Day.

And, even though I have very recently survived one of the hottest, steamiest, most authentically Iowa summer Watermelon Days in memory, I still believe in what such a celebration does for a community. It doesn't make any difference whether the big party in town is Jewell Jubilee or Randall Day or the Stratford Bluegrass Festival or Ellsworth Extravaganza or Williams Fourth of July or the Harvest Festival in Kamrar or the Boone Bash River Dash in Webster City.

What counts is that such events take place. The sweat and fatigue are passing.

It isn't very easy to be the hosts for a town celebration. If you are lucky enough that there are folks who are willing to organize and plan and coordinate the day, then it still takes many people to give some of their time on the day to make it successful. And time is something that many of us think we don't have much of these days.

It's funny that there is the same number of hours in a day as always, but somehow now it often seems we're too busy to make these things happen.

So I just like it when a Watermelon Day happens again, just like it has for the past half-century. For years this celebration was held on the first Tuesday in August, and my family was always there. Eventually it became a Saturday celebration, and my children attended each year. In fact, for quite a few years Watermelon Day was their second-favorite day of the whole year, second only to Christmas. Sometimes I'm pretty sure Watermelon Day won out. And I'm sure they weren't the only kids who felt that way.

I expect that one of the reasons they liked it so much was because it was held in their own community. In most of the little towns around our county, you have to leave to go to school, to shop, to go to the doctor. This was the one time every year when people came to our town to have fun, when we were the hosts, when we were proud to show off what we had.

Such pride is a valuable thing for a little town to have, and you get an extra dose of it when your town hosts hundreds of visitors. I believe that pride is part of what makes people work so hard to pull off a local celebration. In these times when we are scattered around to jobs and family duties and other obligations that pull us in every direction, looking to our community with our neighbors, even for a day, is a gift for everyone involved.