There’s something deeply right about a child wandering around singing a counterculture, anti-authoritarian folk monologue as a seasonal ritual.
I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t sit down and decide that Alice’s Restaurant would become part of our family calendar, slotted neatly between pumpkin pie and leftovers. It just happened. Every year, after Thanksgiving, the song comes on. Every year, my now six-year-old absorbs it the way kids absorb things that feel important without yet knowing why. And for weeks afterward, he sings it. Not because he understands the politics, or the satire, or the historical context. He sings it because it’s a story, and because it belongs to that time of year, and because it feels like ours.
That’s the part that gets me.
Right now, Alice’s Restaurant is just rhythm and voice to him. A long, funny story with a strange shape. A man talking instead of singing. A cadence that loops and meanders and somehow makes sense even when it doesn’t. It’s silly. It’s memorable. It’s comforting. It’s the sound of adults laughing in the kitchen while dishes are stacked and pie is cut.
One day, though, it won’t be just that.
One day he’ll hear it again and realize it isn’t only a funny Thanksgiving song. He’ll notice the absurdity sharpening into critique. He’ll hear the systems being mocked. He’ll understand why the joke keeps going, why the repetition matters, why the ending lands the way it does. He’ll catch the quiet anger under the humor. The refusal to play along with something that doesn’t deserve obedience just because it’s always been done that way.
And he’ll realize he’s been carrying that story with him for years.
That’s why this matters to me. Not because I want to raise a kid who knows a specific song, or even a specific political stance. But because this is how you pass on the idea that the world is allowed to be questioned. You don’t lecture. You don’t explain it to death. You let a story live in the house long enough that it becomes familiar. You let meaning arrive when the listener is ready for it.
Alice’s Restaurant works because it doesn’t announce itself as Important. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It just keeps talking. It circles. It exaggerates. It exposes how ridiculous unquestioned authority can be by treating it exactly as seriously as it deserves.
Letting that be part of our family ritual feels like teaching skepticism the same way you teach taste or humor. By proximity. By repetition. By shared experience.
There’s a quiet kind of confidence in trusting that a kid will get the joke eventually. That you don’t need to sanitize tradition for it to be loving. That cultural literacy doesn’t have to be heavy-handed to be effective. That some lessons are better planted early and left alone.
So yes, hearing my kid wander around the house singing Alice’s Restaurant gives me warm fuzzies. Not because it’s cute, though it is. But because it feels like evidence that something important is being passed along without force.
A story. A question. A reminder that rules are allowed to be ridiculous.
That feels like doing parenting right.