The Marshmallow War: The stickiest July 4th celebrations banned by a town council
July 4th is more than just a holiday in the United States of America. It’s a marker of the time the country threw off the shackles of oppression and told the (once) most powerful country in the world exactly where they could stick them.
Precisely what they did with those shackles of oppression afterwards is a different and much, much more depressing story, but that’s for another time.
The question is, how do you celebrate it? There’s an argument to be made that it should be a sombre reflection. After all, declaring independence led to a blood-soaked war which cost the young nation thousands of lives. They won, but by the absolute skin of their teeth and not without a lot of help from Britain’s countless other rivals.
The parallel universe where the nascent United States lost the Revolutionary War wasn’t a million miles away from happening, so perhaps Independence Day should be a day of remembrance, filled with quiet marches, a wreath around a statue, and a prayer for those lost.
Or, I guess you could house enough beer and hot dogs to kill a bull, blast some Guns N’ Roses as loud as it will go, and pass out watching the mother of all fireworks displays. That does sound a little more fun, to be fair.
This is, actually, in accordance with what the Founding Fathers actually wanted. In a letter that none other than John Adams sent to his wife Abigail, he detailed that the American Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Ironically enough, it wasn’t actually the 4th of July he was talking about, but the day that Congress first voted to approve the Declaration of Independence, July 2nd.
The point still stands, though, and one wonders what he would have thought of the way that Ocean Beach, California, decided to celebrate American Independence.
It began in 1985, when a couple of neighbourhood parties celebrating July 4th convened on Ocean Beach. In amongst the partying, a friendly, good-natured food fight broke out with the weapon of choice being that staple of the American diet, the marshmallow. This became a yearly tradition among the families that held these original parties. Every July 4th, they would convene on Ocean Beach, and part of the festivities would be an extended, marshmallow-flavoured food fight.
The problem was that this, as you can imagine, was incredibly fun, so more people wanted to be a part of it. Soon enough, the entire town was getting involved in lobbing thousands of marshmallows at each other, which was more fun than several barrels of particularly whimsical monkeys in the moment, but then there was the morning after. Every July 5th, the town would wake up to find it carpeted in sunbaked, melted marshmallows that were absolute murder to remove, especially by the beach.
In 2009, the first voices of dissent started to speak up, but a town poll showed that they were in a huge minority, with 69 per cent of the town voting for it to continue exactly how it was. However, as the event grew and grew and the mess the morning after became more and more vile, the same poll in 2013 saw half the town wanting to ban the sale of marshmallows on July 4th.
The year afterwards, the jig was up. The Independence Day celebrations of 2014 saw a marked downturn of people lobbing marshmallows around, thanks to a concentrated campaign by the town council called, marvellously, ‘Mallow Out’. Today, a few marshmallows will be thrown around in Ocean Beach, California for old times sake, but only a little more than in most other Independence Day celebrations. Which, on the one hand, is a thumb in the eye to the local culture of the area.
However, I’m sure a morning spent cleaning up the mess afterwards would give you a very different take on the subject.