I began celebrating Bastille Day nine years ago when my granddaughter, who was born in Paris and lived her first six years in Africa, came back to the United States. She is a dual American-French citizen because her father is French, so it seemed appropriate as well as fun.

July fourteenth is always sunny and warm (it doesn’t rain in summer here), so we put tables out on the lawn where the trees provide shade from the sun, and have a lovely dinner for about a dozen guests, my version of French food as gleaned from cookbooks and the internet. You can Google ‘French picnic’ and get lists of all the things the French might serve at a picnic, and in the early years I used to try to actually provide all those things, but I finally figured out that the list is just suggestions, not commandments – it’s okay to just select a reasonable amount of items from the list.

I use red-and-white checkered tablecloths and vases of flowers (always available in my garden in July) and my best dishes. 

Years ago I made a party game for Bastille Day called “Your Trip Around France.” I took an old sheet and pegged it out with pins onto my living room rug and created a grid over it with threads held in place by pins. Then I took a map of France and drew a grid over it, and, square by square, I drew the map of France onto the sheet, indicating the locations of major cities and sites. I drew dotted lines to indicate the journeys of the players all around France from one city/site to the next, ending in Paris, according to the roll of a giant six-sided die made of cardboard. The playing pieces were stand-up pictures of famous French men and women (not identified; part of the game is to name them). The towns are all illustrated with pictures on cards pinned to the sheet, and they are all described with informative sentences on the score sheets. We play this game every year (the sheet is pegged onto the lawn) and everyone has fun.

Finally we don red flannel Phrygian caps with tricolor cockades and march down the street carrying a large French flag and singing the Marseillaise, to the astonishment of passing pedestrians and motorists. I made that French flag years ago when I was teaching flag etiquette at Girl Scout day camp and needed a foreign flag to demonstrate how flags are arranged when more than one country is represented. The French flag is very easy to make, so that’s what I did, and lo and behold, years later I had a French granddaughter and needed that flag!