Proud Members of Red Sox Nation

I would not normally do this, but Jen over at "Diary of 1" was kind enough to give a shout-out to me on her blog and I do like to support the cottage businesses of homeschooling families as a general practice. Anyways, she is having a contest to promote her family's sports merchandise store called TeamMascot.com. Jen is granting a $20 credit towards anything TeamMascot carries to the first 20 people who blog about their favorite sports team. Since I usually give Red Sox-themed items to various of my relatives at Christmas, I might as well buy them from Jen's store rather than some huge chain, KWIM?

If you were to visit our home, it would be very obvious where our sports allegiances lie. Even though DH and I grew up in different areas, the sports teams fortunately are not league rivals. Our favorites hardly ever meet, except in the Super Bowl and the World Series. Even then, he's more of a football fan and I'm more into baseball. I can live with our kids rooting for the Eagles over the Patriots if he can live with them rooting for the Red Sox over the Phillies.

Just by coincidence, my DS is wearing his Red Sox shortalls and matching shirt today and I read him the picture book Fenway Park from A to Z by the Red Sox Wives Organization this morning. My DD wore her Red Sox pajamas to bed last night.

On the kids' bookshelf, there are also: Fenway Park 1-2-3 by the Red Sox Wives, For the Love of the Red Sox by Mark W. Anderson, 86 Years: The Legend of the Boston Red Sox by Melinda Boroson, and 101 Reasons to Love the Red Sox and 10 Reasons to Hate the Yankees by David Green.

On the nursery wall are the 2004 American League Champions and the 2004 World Champions pennants and a framed membership certificate for my DD of "Red Sox Kid Nation".

My brother taught my DD to say "Yankees stink! Go Red Sox!" when she was not quite 2. Of course, at the time it sounded more like "Ankee tink! Go wessok!" I'm just thankful he had enough sense to teach her the "clean" version!

The night that the Red Sox finally won the World Series again after 86 years, I woke DD up during the 7th inning stretch to take her to a party they were having at my DH's grad school. She had just had her 2nd birthday but I didn't want her to miss history in the making. When they got the final out, I was overcome and poor DD started bawling too! I had to tell her through the tears that I was crying because I was so happy but of course she was too young to understand.

Here's a photo I took of her that night before all the tears started flowing:


So why am I such a die-hard Red Sox fan? I think it's because the team means(t) so much to my dad and especially to his father. My poor grandpa was a lifelong Sox fan but he passed away before he got to see them win the World Series :-( So many times over the years they came so close to winning it all, only to rip the fans' hearts out at the last minute (Bucky "bleeping" Dent, Bill Buckner's error, and too many other painful memories to mention). Yet despite it all, my grandpa remained fiercely loyal and always believed that "this will be our year" even though it never was during his lifetime. Being a member of Sox Nation prior to 2004 was the triumph of hope over experience.

It's easy to be a Yankees fan with their 26 championships and all but eventually David won out over Goliath. The Yankees had the most humiliating choke EVER in MLB history and boy was that sweet for all of us who got to witness it! I realize that's not a very Christian thing for me to say, LOL!

I don't know if the Red Sox will come to mean as much to my kids as they do to me for several reasons. First, they are growing up outside of New England so they won't have the peer reinforcement aspect. Yes, there are members of Red Sox Nation all over the world, but they don't get the same media attention out here that the local teams do. Second, they won't have the close association with my grandfather since he passed away before DH and I were even married. Finally, 2004 changed what it meant to be a Sox fan. Before, they were the underdogs, the ones you really had to rely on faith and hope in order to support. It was almost a form of masochism. My kids won't have any memory of "the Curse" or any understanding of just how tough it was to watch them blow it over and over. Yet paradoxically their struggles made their fans all that more loyal to them. "Cowboy up!" "Believe" and all the other slogans we Sox lovers chanted through the many long decades...