I love the traditions at Christmas time. John and I each had favorites from our childhood weve carried over and we've established some of our own. Here is one of my favorites that we carried over from my childhood.

After getting our tree (sometimes fresh-cut from the mountains!) we would bring it home to decorate it. We would listen to several albums including:

A Christmas Together RECORD!
John Denver & The Muppets

Once the decorating was finished we would sing carols and drink eggnog. We've kept up this tradition in our house (ironically without the carol sing) and this year my husband stepped up the eggnog to a whole new level. LOOK at how beautiful that is!

Here are a few shots of our decorations.

Did you know that READING RAINBOW is still on TV??!?!!! Now that I know, it's going on my TIVO season pass list. Oh. Yeah.



Thanks Rhett & LInk for bringing back such warm childhood memories.




By the way, was anybody else confused about how Geordi La Forge suddenly didn't need his banana clip visor? That rocked my world. Just in case you don't remember the classic character Geordi, according to startrek.com, he was the Chief Engineer on the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-E. He was born on February 16, 2335 in The African Confederation, Earth. According to Counselor Deanna Troi's Biolographical file on Geordi:

The outstanding characteristic La Forge shows is his longtime adaptability to and satisfaction with life, symbolized by the fact that his birth-blindness until recently was overcome not by direct surgery but by the unique VISOR instrument — which, though painful allowed him to "see" throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, from heat and infrared through visible light to radio waves. It attached at the temples via implants which connected directly to the brain and provided such a complex and broad-based input that the user had to concentrate to focus on one area. It was perhaps this intense focusing ability that has enabled him to master the complexities of warp engineering and other starship systems.

Fascinating, truly fascinating. Good ol' Geordi.

I just got an email from my Dad with the subject "Some Photos for Your Memoirs"

1. I'm writing memoirs? Oh boy, one more thing to do. Can my blog count as my "memoirs'?

2. What was I thinking? Did I wake up late that morning and have to throw on the first thing I found or did I actually think that looked good?

3. The excuse for the hair-do has to be the rain, or rather, the mist that constantly blessed us Washingtonians and ruined even the nicest hair-dos. Actually, I'm not sure that style looked any better before I went outside that morning.

4. Theresa, I know we haven't seen each other since HS graduation, but if you happen upon my blog and see this photo - I'm sorry, so so sorry. Thanks for being my friend even though I occasionally dressed like that. It was occasionally wasn't it?



The others aren't quite as painful or humiliating as the first, but I'll include them just for memories sake. Sooz, Chris, Peter, Patti and Omega - remember those times? They were so great.

Mom and Dad came through with a great shot of the boat in all its glory




Did I mention that the horn was a complete chord? Oh yeah....

THANKS M & D!

.....I don't have a lot of memories of my clam diggin' days at family camp since I was still pretty young when we switched to chili cook-offs. Why did we switch to chili cook-offs you ask? Much to our parents' chagrin, the razor clams of Washington were becoming endangered and the state no longer allowed clamming on Camano Island. Anyway, for many years family camp was around the first week in July, which just happened to be the peak of clam season on the Washington shores. I remember getting up at an ungodly hour to catch low tide at the beach on Friday morning. I’d watch our group walk around like hunchbacks, peering into the sand and under rocks just waiting for that tell-tale sign of clam life - streams of clam spit. Read More...

.....As we got older and less inclined to hang out with our parents we loved to designate an empty site as the "youth site." We wouldn't set up any tents or anything like that, we would just make sure it was supplied with firewood. Every evening we'd bring over snacks, sodas and a boom box and hang out for hours talking, laughing, telling stories and singing our favorite worship songs. It was basically the same group that hung out every summer during those years, plus or minus a few. We'd pretty much stay out of trouble except for the occasional noise warning, but there was one year we decided to go to the beach after hours. We all piled in the back of Larry Roe's truck and drove down the hill to the beach to play capture the flag. To my recollection, we had played only 15 minutes when Ranger Roy drove up to scold us for breaking the rules. It was a thrilling trek into the wild world of rule breaking.....



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.....For many years Family Camp was around the first week of July. In the green state of Washington, the 4th of July weekend is statistically the rainiest weekend of the year. Consequently, we had alot of rainy Family Camps. The dads (I'm sure led by my Dad and Jim Martin) would rig up tarps all over the camp ground so that you could walk from site to site and never be in the rain. It was a site to see. The whole group campground had an odd blue glow and the rain sounded about 20x louder than normal....but it was super cool. If Google earth had a feature where you could see satellite photos from the past, I'd look up Camano Island State Park Campground in July of 1990. I wonder if we threw off any overhead flights or attracted NASA's attention.....



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.....There were always various non-serious injuries that occurred at family camp, most of them not significant enough to remember. Of course there were plenty of sunburns, scrapes, bruises and bug bites, but there are 2 injuries that stick out in my memory.

Sometime around the very first family camp we were sitting around the fire roasting marshmallows and no doubt singing silly songs when Beth's marshmallow caught fire. She swung her roasting stick up fast to blow out the fire before it turned a perfectly roasted mallow into a charred smokey mess. The flaming mallow flew right off the stick and stuck right on her cheek! I don't know if Beth remembers this happening or not. In fact, I don't remember the actual event at all, but every time I roast marshmallows I think to myself, "beware the flying flaming mallow."

Another injury began with an innocent bike ride around the loop. Kaleo and I were planning to ride on the cliff trail through the forest and as we rode out of her site, her mom yelled after us, "don't ride your bike in flip-flops!" "Pfft." I thought. "What could happ...AHHHH" About 25 feet up the loop the gear slipped and my foot slid right off the pedal and into the front wheel wedging my big toe between the bar and spokes. "Don't panic," I thought, "just pull it back out." Yank. Yank. "Oh no..." The toe was stuck and I was caught precariously balancing with one foot on the ground and the other stuck in the wheel. Fortunately, Rico Figueroa came to my rescue twisting the toe till it popped out. It started as a pretty weird looking dent then quickly swelled up to look like a sausage that had been microwaved too long. And so began the curse of the big toe. From that day on, my toe suffered the majority of my injuries and to this day still gets achy on rainy days. I'll tell you one thing, I don't ride my bike in flip-flops anymore.....



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....Once we set up camp....well I'm pretty sure we helped set up camp, at least in the later years. Most likely there were many years when we would jump out of the boat and run straight to the Bradford's or the Figueroa's campsites. In the group campground the church reserved every summer there were about 12 big sites on a loop road with a parking area in the middle, an amphitheater on one side and the stinkiest outhouses in the world on the other. It was in the middle of the forest with all kinds of fun trails and was only about a 10 minute hike from the beach. Each site was large enough to hold 2-4 families and we filled most of them up every summer.

I remember when we bought our family tent. It was at a camping/outdoors store in Everett and Dad got one that was so durable, I think they still have it some 20 years later. It was beige and burgundy and big enough to fit all 5 of us, but I think we were squished pretty close together. It felt like it was huge probably because it was tall enough for my Dad to stand up straight in it. Of course, the older we got the smaller it felt. No one else had a tent like it and I've never seen another since. One summer Amy got her own tent. She had worked for months at one of those points programs where if you sell enough items you get to use your accumulated points to buy whatever you want out of the catalogue. She got herself a gray and blue single man dome tent. She set it up back a ways from the family tent and I remember she, Ang and Renee spending hours talking and giggling inside that tiny tent. It was so cool.

We had alot of traditions that we looked forward to every summer. From devotional meetings with camp songs and flannelgraphs to clam chowder cook-offs using freshly dug clams (eventually evolved into chili cook-offs) to beach game day. But my favorite tradition of all was campfire time. Every evening we would all gather in different sites and play cards or tell stories or just watch the fire, but inevitably our site would gather the largest crowd as Dad broke out the guitar. We'd sing silly songs that only Dad could remember all the lyrics to. "Crabs walk sideways and lobsters walk straight so we won't let you taker her for your mate" , "I knows it, knows it, indeed I knows it broder, I knows it, WEE, dem bones gonna rise again" , "Sweet Violet, sweeter than all the roses, covered all over from head to toe, covered all over with sweet violets" and many more. Then one year we discovered Patrick F. McManus. From then on, every year Dad would get out his clip on book light and read a chapter or two. I think we would have read more, but it took so long to get through that much for all the laughter that we couldn't take any more. Some of our favorite chapters were Strange Meets Matilda Jean, The Night the Bear Ate Goomba, and A Fine and Pleasant Misery. I can just picture it now, about 20 of us all gathered around one small fire howling as Dad squeezed out as much sentence as he could, becoming each character, before bursting into laughter, his deep voice reaching new tenor heights as he attempted to read on. I've listened to some of the stories on tape recently and I'm pretty sure I didn't get alot of the humor, but I loved when Dad read them.......

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Some of my favorite childhood memories were made at family camp and I hope that my someday kids will have the joy of making camping memories too. This summer, we're gonna try to start the JLM camping tradition with our first kid, the Fritz. But until then....

Every summer, when I was a kid in WA, my family would pack up the car and homemade trailer and head out for the annual church family camp on Camano Island. As is true with most memorable family vacations the hilarity started much sooner than the first drive of the tent spike into the dirt. For many years we had a "very comfortable" car we affectionately referred to as The Boat, not only because it was ginormous and blue, but also because every one of us was confident that if we were to ever have an accident where we ended up in a body of water - we'd float. I always thought we should have kept oars and fishing poles in the enormous trunk so that if said accident ever occurred, we could just row back to shore and catch some fish on the way. Anyway, for the years we owned the boat, we also owned a custom, single wheeled, homemade trailer that my Dad, AKA MacGyver, had rigged with a bike rack. Now, the boat was already exactly 1 inch longer than the 17 passenger vans my school used to bus around the basketball team and with the trailer....I'm sure we would have qualified as a semi in some states. If we had to stop at a store on the way to pick up last minute items, we'd have to look for 2 parking spots back to back or a bus parking spot at the far end of the lot. To add to the humor of our already odd transportation, we would load up our 3 ten-speeds and Dad would somehow manage to wedge the mattress from the hide-a-bed, all rolled up like a burrito, in between the bikes so that it sat awkwardly protruding out past all 6 wheels. Fortunately, the drive to Camano Island wasn't that long and Dad was apparently a rope-ninja, so the bikes, mattress and trailer all made it to the campsite intact. I don't remember much about backing the boat/trailer into the campsite, but until we got the trailer unhitched, the trunk unpacked, and the boat moved to the parking lot (in the longest spot, mind you) I'm pretty sure we blocked the group-site-loop from any other normal sized cars trying to get through. Good thing my Dad was also a packer/unpacker-ninja........


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