The best thing about a summer festival is that we can celebrate out of doors in green places where many people can come together--men and women, young people and old people and very little children, families and friends and strangers, echoing one another's pleasure in the event. That is the style we set long ago for the annual celebration of our country's birthday. The Fourth of July is pre-eminently an outdoor holiday--a day for family picnics, a day for celebrations on the greens and commons and plazas of villages and small towns, a day for outdoor games and for fireworks at dusk, a day on which people gather to enjoy themselves and one another.

So it is especially appropriate that one of the principal ways we have chosen to celebrate this year of America's 200th birthday is with outdoor, summertime festivals.