Lifestyle

8 Facts Guaranteed to Boost Your Texas Pride

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Tony Maples Photography

 

“Good old Texas…where the tea is sweet and accents are sweeter, summer starts in April, front porches are wide and words are long, macaroni & cheese is a vegetable, BBQ is the state food, y’all is a proper pronoun, chicken is fried, biscuits come with gravy, everyone is honey, someone is always getting their hearts blessed, and we are all ‘fixin’ to do something.” —Unknown

Texas PridePhoto: Texas Ranch Heritage

1. The Texas flag is the only state flag that is allowed to be flown as high as the American Flag.

The Texas flag is on everything from logos to letterheads, to license plates, and we put the shape of Texas on everything else. From pools, to pancakes, to pencil erasers, we all know how to draw Texas by the time we can hold a pencil.

2. We take our bar fun serious.

Up the road from New Braunfels, The Happy Cow Bar & Grill is the only bar in Hunter, Texas with indoor plumbing, belt sander racing the 3rd Saturday of each month, and Cow-E-Oke every Thursday.

3. Everything in Texas is intentionally bigger.

Texans like big things. Our state is big. Our pickup trucks are big. Our convenience stores and gas stations are big, with 120 pumps at the I-35 Buc-ee’s, halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Our capital building in Austin is big—taller than the United States Capital Building in Washington, D.C.

4. Small towns in the Hill Country usually have only one chain restaurant.

Texas PridePhoto: HeroViral

You can bet it’s a Dairy Queen, where seeing a couple horses at the drive thru window is not out of the ordinary.

5. Texans are notorious for creating our own pronunciations for words.

Many town names in the Hill Country are of foreign origin, and we are just not super adept at proper foreign pronunciation. So, we all agree on how to pronounce the word and stick to that. Boerne is “Bernie”, Gruene is “Green”, Pedernales is “Perd-nales”, and Manchaca is “Man-shack”.

6. Snow is about as alien to Texans as, well, actual aliens.

We wear strange things in the winter because winter isn’t an annual event in Texas, particularly in the Texas Hill Country. Sometimes we just skip it and go straight into spring. We don’t have a “winter closet” full of coats, hats, sweaters, and gloves, so we just throw on a parka and basketball shorts or a hoodie, leggings, and flip-flops.

7. Chili is the official dish of the state of Texas, and we take it very seriously.

Texas PridePhoto: Slate

Read my lips: Chili. Does. Not. Have. Beans. Plain and simple. We take chili so serious that we even have weekend-long festivals devoted to its creation. The festivities in Leander, Lukenbach, and Johnson City in the Hill Country attract folks from all over the state. Heck, from all over the country to be exact!

8. Texans perpetuate the cycle of fervent regional pride in our public schools.

Texas history starts in kindergarten and continues through high school. All school children can tell you the state bird is a Mockingbird, the state motto is Friendship, and the state tree is the Pecan Tree.

So, if you move here from out of state with your family, just know that we’ll be indoctrinating your kids with our Texas pride. Just visiting? As stubborn as we are about things, we love guests. We want you to come on over, and we want you to come on back, ya hear?