Hippies are often associated with Woodstock, 60s, Summer of Love, Rainbow Gatherings, Grateful Dead, tie-dyed cloths, bell bottoms, peace signs and loving to party. The term hippie actually came from the word hipster and was often used to refer to the younger bohemian crowd. The hippies were best known as being involved in the 1960s counterculture movement and for protesting the Vietnam War. Sixties gatherings such as Woodstock and the Summer of Love are often thought of when hippies are mentioned. The Summer of Love was the summer of 1967 in San Francisco where thousands of young people flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district of the city to join the hippie experience. The Woodstock Music Festival brought over 400,000 people to a 600 acre dairy farm in Bethel, NY to hear music from musicians like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Hippies often chose to live either a nomadic or communal lifestyle freeing themselves from possessions. Hippies join in Rainbow Gatherings every year which are held in various locations in public lands such as national forests. They gather and spread peace and love, celebrate nature and then when they leave, they respectfully clean up anything and everything a group of over 20,000 people could have left behind. Hippies would embrace certain aspects of other religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, or Native American religions to separate themselves from traditional middle class Western values.

Share the Hippies History with your kids as a bedtime story.