I Heart Camp Day is February 1st!

We invite our GAC families and friends to join us in celebrating I Heart Camp Day on Wednesday, February 1st! If you’re nervous that you don’t have any I Heart Camp decorations and haven’t been invited to a big I Heart Camp Day block party, don’t worry! Celebrating this day doesn’t require a trip to the party store. It just requires you to love camp and to be willing to share that love.

Just take a picture of yourself holding a sign that says “I Heart Camp” (you could use the picture at the top of this story if you need inspiration) and then post it on your favorite social media on February 1st. Tag us (@goldarrowcamp) and use the hashtag #IHeartCamp. We’ll share yours on our social media accounts! We love seeing everyone from staff to campers to alumni to parents getting involved!

A Grateful Family Is A Happy Family: Five Gratitude Practices

Creating a grateful family culture is a challenge in our entitled, indulgent age. Yet much research has confirmed what we intuitively know – practicing gratitude and being grateful are keys to a happier life. Therefore, it’s well worth our consistent and continued effort as parents to model and teach our kids to practice gratitude.  As we enter this Thanksgiving month, let’s promote gratitude in our families. After all, if we constantly dwell on what’s going wrong in our lives and in the world (and stay focused on what we don’t have), we are left feeling anxious, empty, and depressed. But when we take time to count our blessings, we shift our mindsets and become happier, more grateful people.

For those of you who would like to create a more grateful family culture, here are five family gratitude practices you might try. If your family is like most, they will  likely only agree to participate in one or two of these, so choose one that resonates for you and go for it!

Daily Gratitude Sharing

Just like we do with our Highs and Lows at dinner or at camp with campers around the campfire, we can get into the habit of sharing, as a family, one (or more) things we’re grateful for. This can be at family dinner, on the car ride to school, at bedtime, or whatever time works best with your family’s schedule. Just make it a daily habit and everyone will get used to it. When we’ve tried this, it seems to eventually warrant some kind of guidelines about what types of things are “shareable.” For example, being thankful for a particular video game might be appropriate to share once, but it’s best to encourage everyone to share about people and events (rather than things) they are grateful for.

Gratitude Jar or Board

This can be an ongoing family gratitude practice, perhaps kicked off at Thanksgiving and ending on New Year’s Eve. For the jar, people jot down things they are grateful for and put the notes inside. On a specified day (end of the year is good!), empty the jar and read the notes so the whole family can reflect on individual and group blessings. A board is a more visual way to show thanks. Simply tack the notes up as you think of things you’re thankful for. Having  a “minimum daily or weekly requirement” of one note per person works well, just so we make it a habit and fill up our jar or board.

Thankful “Warm Fuzzies” at Thanksgiving

This is one of my favorite activities and something we’ve done for the past few years. Each family member has an oversized place card at their dining spot. Throughout the afternoon and evening, people are required to write something they appreciate or are grateful for about each person on the inside of their place card. It can be just a few words or a whole sentence, but each person needs to write on everyone’s card. These are really fun keepsakes that provide a nice boost to each family member. This can also be done as a group by passing the cards around until each person has signed each other person’s card. When your own card gets back to you, you’ve completed your warm fuzzies!

Gratitude Journal

Ask each family member to find a journal that’s sitting empty or partially empty, or even a spiral notebook will do, and ask them to write down two or three things they are thankful for each day. If someone is feeling especially creative, they can even decorate their journal!  From experience, it’s best not to force anyone to write in their journals! Sharing out loud, at dinner or bedtime (see #1), is better for kids who don’t enjoy writing. Perhaps a good alternative would be a family gratitude journal, completed by a parent or designated scribe, when everyone’s sharing what they’re grateful for. That would be similar to the gratitude jar or gratitude board.

Giving to Others

Perhaps the best way to promote gratitude in our children and ourselves is reaching out and serving others who are less fortunate. There are so many opportunities this time of year (and all year long, for that matter) to participate in collection and delivery of food, toys for children, winter coats, and more. There are so many needy people, and reaching out to help others (even virtually!) not only makes us more kind and compassionate, but also more appreciative of what we have.

There are so many ways to build up our gratitude muscles, and helping our kids learn to be more grateful people can have a life-long positive impact. Here’s to an attitude of gratitude during the holidays! Happy Thanksgiving!

Camp T-Shirt Day

Camp T-Shirt Day is Tuesday, November 8th!

We invite all Gold Arrow families and staff to join us and other camps around the world as we celebrate International Wear Your Summer Camp T-Shirt Day on November 8th. Do you want to take part in the fun? It’s easy, just wear your favorite GAC shirt (or any GAC gear!), take a picture, upload it to social media, and use the hashtag #CampTShirtDay. If you tag us too (@goldarrowcamp), we’ll share some of our favorites on our Instagram. We can’t wait to see your best GAC gear! Learn more about Camp T-Shirt Day here.

BONUS EPISODE: Sunshine & Soy Talk About How Counselors Bring GAC’s Philosophy To Life

We don’t have a patreon and so far Spotify hasn’t offered the POG-Cast an exclusive deal. We’ll never put our episodes behind a paywall, but we thought we should do what so many other podcasts do and share a bonus episode!

On this special episode of the Gold Arrow Camp POG-Cast, Soy and Sunshine got rid of our usual format and just talked about camp and what makes camp special, with a focus on how our amazing counselors deliver that experience and what we as a camp want them to get out of the experience. (spoiler alert, our goals for counselors are NOT to Have Fun, Make Friends, and Grow – even if that does happen!)

We hope you enjoy this look behind the curtain and are looking forward to our format shift for the summer, when the POG-Cast becomes Whadda Week (and recaps the week at camp). We’ll be right back here, in your feed as soon as camp is in full swing again!

 

Hilly

Episode 70

In this episode, we’re joined from across the pond by Hilly, who is entering his third year on our staff. Hilly and Soy had a great chat about the benefits of camp (other than the weather) as well as a classic geometry-based Joke of the Cast. If you’d like to see Hilly, you can check out our Meet The Staff page and you can listen to his previous appearance on the POG here.

Spotlight & Penguin

Episode 69

On this episode of the podcast, we reunite two camp friends live on the POG-Cast! Spotlight and Penguin are two great friends who didn’t know each other (even though they are both long-time campers and Junior Counselors) before training week of 2021 when they became fast friends. We chat about making friends, GACting, Arts & Crafts, and their favorite Big Campfire memories. There’s also a great Dad Joke of the Cast!

Chai

Episode 68.

Chai is a long-time GAC staff member. She’s met innumerable campers in her time leading backpacking trips and working in the wellness center. Now she’s getting to see camp through the eyes of her nieces who came to camp for the first time this summer. In honor of the Grammys there’s a musically themed joke of the cast from a very pleased Soy.

Mariachi

Episode 67.

 

Our guest this time on the POG-Cast is a fan favorite: Mariachi. He started as an international camper, then was a Junior Counselor, and spent 2021 as a counselor at Rocks & Ropes. He and Soy have a wide-ranging conversation, discussing what it’s like to come to camp for the first time in another country to which Bear Trap counselor makes the best popcorn. If you are curious about coming to GAC from outside the US, this is a great episode. There’s also a Joke of the Day that Soy enjoyed more than he should have.

The Gift of Handwritten Letters

Recently, I’ve been going through the many boxes of letters, photos, and memorabilia which I have collected over my first five decades. It’s been a time-consuming task, but I’m trying to organize into a smaller number of boxes what has been accumulated over the first half of my life.  What has struck me most is the huge number of letters I amassed from my childhood, high school, and college friends. Until this week, I didn’t remember how much we corresponded, but I just finished going through hundreds of letters.  I now have proof of the many friendships that were solidified over hours of writing to one another.

I mostly have the ones written to me, but I can assume from the “Thanks for your letter”s that I was writing at the same rate as my friends were. Maybe some of my letters are in a box out there somewhere?

Not only was there a huge volume of letters (see picture), some of the letters were ten pages long, with tiny writing. Others were short notes or fun greeting cards. Most of them were in beautiful, cursive writing, even some from boys!  What an amazing thing to think about. Back then, without the distractions we all have today, we had TIME to write letters like that!  Plus, we enjoyed it and we were good at it!  We wrote letters because often long-distance phone calls were too expensive.  Many of us traveled and studied overseas, so the letters chronicle our trips.

The process of trying to get rid of most of this paper required that I at least skim through each one. I pulled out many that I simply can’t bear to throw away.  I found letters from my late grandparents, with their words of wisdom. I found letters my parents had written to me over the years.  I also found letters from friends showing major teen angst, which is a good reminder now that I have teens of my own. We weren’t that different back then after all! It’s just that we didn’t splash our anger and sadness at each other on Facebook. We wrote each other heartfelt notes.

One thing I realized is that my kids will not have a big box of letters like mine. They don’t write letters like we did in the pre-computer, pre-email, pre-social networking, pre-cell phone era.  But then I had a revelation! They DO still get to send and receive letters.  It’s when they’re at camp!  I have told parents how much campers enjoy getting “real” mail while at camp (the kind with a stamp), but now I have realized another benefit – they will have these letters as keepsakes and memories of their childhood. And you, as parents, most definitely should save all of the letters you get from your camper!

Among my box, I came across a postcard I sent to my parents in 1977, when I was a camper at Gold Arrow Camp. This is what it said:

 

My postcard home from camp, 1977.

“Dear Mommy,

I think it’s mean that you have to write a letter to get into dinner, but I’m glad to write a letter to you because I love you. It’s been raining since we got here. But we still went horseback riding. I wrote a letter to daddy this morning and sent it. Camp is so fun. I can’t wait to tell you. My counslers name is Liz. She’s nice.

Love, Audrey”

Let me tell you, we have gotten some good laughs in our house over this postcard. Not just about how I spelled “counselor,” but about my comment about the “Mail Meal” (dinners on Wednesday and Sunday that you need to have a letter or postcard home as your ticket in). The dreaded “Mail Meal” has been a camp tradition for as long as anyone can remember, but I didn’t even remember thinking it was a bad thing.  My adult view is much different than my ten-year-old one! I now understand how much parents need those letters.  I hope most kids get beyond the “I have to write this letter” part, and share some of their feelings and memories of camp. The resulting memorabilia will be priceless.

So, here’s to another benefit of camp I’ve only this week realized. We have the chance for our kids to experience the (almost) lost art of writing and receiving handwritten letters. And you, as a parent, have a chance to write down words that your child will be able to read and keep long beyond any email you’ve sent them!

P.S.  Did you see this hilarious book?  P.S. I Hate it Here: Letters from Camp  It is full of some really funny, real letters kids wrote to their parents from camps.

Taz

Episode 66.

 

This time on the POG-Cast we have one of our long-time staffers. A former camper, a lover of baseball and fishing, a leader of the OLC, and a boat driver extraordinaire, Taz was a really fun chat and a great way for Soy to slide back into the POG-Cast for Season 5! Joke of the Cast is here to help brighten any day too!