Have you noticed that we seem to be a nation of fair-weather flag-wavers?

That's not meant to be an incendiary taunt impugning anyone's patriotism. That kind of talk is soooo last year.

I literally mean we have a seasonal love affair with Old Glory. The first big flag-rich holiday of the year is Memorial Day -- the unofficial start of summer, when we salute our war dead, fire up the grill and open the pools.

Next is Flag Day, which is Sunday, then Independence Day, then Labor Day, when we fly the flag because … there are parades, and you can't have a parade without flags. Also because the weather's about to change, and we can't have the flag hanging out in the freezing rain, getting stiff.

It's a darn good thing Congress standardized the official United States flag in June rather than February, because in much of the country, you couldn't stand outside and admire the way it flutters proudly from your porch for more than a few minutes before your extremities turn red, white and/or blue.

It's also lucky that the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in July rather than on, say, New Year's Eve; winter days are so short you'd just get the flag hoisted and it would be sunset and time to take it down again.

Summer is definitely the best time to be festive with your flag, when it can snap in the sunshine and billow against a blue sky. And a flag is a very important thing. Every decent, self-respecting country that expects to be taken seriously has to have a flag. It's like a credit card that way.

Want a global pole? You send a bunch of guys in parkas trudging through the snow, and when their compasses go screwy, they plant a flag. Dibs!

Two years ago, the Russians claimed the ocean floor under the North Pole by sending a couple of deep-sea minisubs more than 10,000 feet underwater to plant a flag. What kind of flag could withstand that environment? Is it just a flat plaque, like one of those geological survey markers? Is it lit?

The Russians can say anything, of course.

"Oh, da, it's a real flag. It's very beautiful. It's Tyvek, and it glows in the dark, and the weird sightless worms at the bottom of the sea salute it every time they pass.

"We were going to take a picture, but the pressure crushed the camera. And the sailor holding it. But it's totally there."

Who's going to go down to check? Scuba diving under the North Pole to see the Russian flag on the sea floor: The Worst Vacation Ever.

At least when we claimed the moon by sticking a flag in it, we took video. Frankly, I think we overpaid for that real estate. And 40 years later, not a single condo. I'm not sure they even finished the golf course.

But we can go around sticking our flag in everything from satellites to Kaiser rolls, thanks to the foresight of the Continental Congress, which appointed a committee late in 1775 to design an official flag symbolizing the unity of all the colonies. Up till then, various interests had been coming up with their own flags, some of which Congress considered a little too disrespectful of the British government, like the one featuring a wickedly smiling Calvin watering the head of King George.

(No, that's not an anachronism. New England was full of Calvinists.)

You can't talk about the flag without bringing up Betsy Ross; while there's no hard evidence that she stitched up the prototype, she was a successful upholsterer who made flags for the U.S. government and sold even more when she stopped stuffing them.

But during the Revolution, our flags still had a certain freelance quality. The defenders of a fort in Rome, N.Y., put together an American flag out of clothing in August 1777.

Any time of year but summer, they might not have had white clothes to cut up. Thank goodness it was after Memorial Day.