Niko and Dad Get Their Geek On

When I was a kid, I tried to start a club in which the members would research, write, and present reports about different countries. Needless to say, my buddies weren't really interested in my Geography Club, and after my attempts to recruit members resulted in absolutely no takers, it disbanded before anyone could hear my riveting piece about the Benelux Low Countries.

Forty years later, I may have an actual member!

Niko has always taken everyone's Mexican flags on toothpicks from their plates at La Macarena. But last week after seeing the Union Jack sticking out of my fish and chips, he announced he wanted to build a collection of little flags on toothpicks from around the world.

So we ordered a set from Amazon. His first order of business? Rifle through the flags with a single-minded determination looking for one flag in particular: Greece.

He then mounted them in Styrofoam.

Then he decided he needed some sort of labeling system, so he can identify which flag represents which country. There are, after all, 100 flags.

So last night we made a master list. We looked up the flags we didn't know, and I explained some of the similarities and differences. For example, how all the Scandinavian countries have the same design, but different colors.

We talked about Muslim countries have a crescent moon and star on them, like Christian countries have a cross. And yeah, I may have mentioned that Serbia, Romania, Russia, Armenia and Georgia are all Orthodox Christian countries.

He told me about the different symbols and designs he saw, and hypothesized what they represented. The placement of these stars, for example...

 ...clearly form an "H" for Honduras.

But why there's a chicken sphinx on Zimbabwe's flag remains a mystery.

When we were done, we had a nice legend with a picture of each flag and the name of the country it represents in order of how he placed them in the Styrofoam. He can't wait to take his collection to school to show his flags to his friends.

Who knows, maybe one day he'll ask me to tell him all I know about the Benelux countries comprised of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, for which a committee focused on cooperation between the three countries commissioned a flag in 1957, which probably isn't found in any mail-order box of national colors on toothpicks.

The lion is from the Luxembourgian coat of arms...