Sadie Hawkins Day

By Diane Forrest,

During the summers of my 11th and 12th years I spent a week at Camp Lake Forest, in Mississippi.  It was a great camp with lots of fun activities.  One of the best parts about camp was breakfast.  We all sat at these long tables covered with breakfast food, eggs, pancakes, biscuits, bacon sausage, milk, juice.  It was all so delicious that I think it accounts for the reason why still today going out to eat breakfast is my favorite thing.

During the day we were participate in all kinds of sports, crafts, learning, and meeting new friends.  The days seemed to just fly by.  On the night before we were to leave the camp hosted a Sadie Hawkins dance.   We had no idea what this was, but it was explained to us that the girls were to ask the boys to take us to the dance.  I guess the reason being that boys at that age were too shy to ask a girl to go to the dance.  Little did they know that I was too shy too.  There was a cute boy there that I wanted to ask, but never could get up the nerve, so instead I asked a longtime friend to go and ended up having a great time.

Sadie Hawkins was the creation of Al Capp, a cartoonist who wrote the comic strip Li'l Abner from 1934 to 1978.  Li'l Abner was a classic hillbilly comic strip that took place in a town called Dogpatch USA.  One of the earliest "settlers" was a man named Hekzebiah Hawkins. Hekzebiah's daughter, Sadie, was one of the homeliest girls in all them hills, and was 35 years old and still unmarried.  Worried that she would remain at home for the rest of her life, he came up with a plan.  He called together all the unmarried men of Dogpatch and declared it "Sadie Hawkins Day". Specifically, a foot race was decreed, with Sadie in hot pursuit of the town's eligible bachelors—and matrimony as the consequence.  The other unmarried ladies in town also thought this was a good idea, and declared it an annual event.  If a woman caught a bachelor and dragged him, kicking and screaming, across the finish line before sundown—by law he had to marry her!

in 1937, when this concept was first introduced, it spread like wild fire across the country in schools and colleges.  Sadie Hawkin's dances were held every year in the US and Canada.  Since today is Sadie Hawkin's Day, why not bite the bullet and ask that guy out for coffee or lunch.  You never know what can happen.  I wouldn't recommend asking a guy out if you are already married or in a relationship though.