Sunday Afternoon Fun with Food Week

The Sunday afternoon blues…

 Well it’s that time of the week again. One o’clock just after our staff meeting and our counselors are wandering about camp finishing preparations for another group of kids to come. This week Fun with Food Week will be our biggest of the summer. With seven cabins (five girls’ and two boys’ cabins) and and all of them full camp will be filled with excited and enthusiastic campers.

Natalie King our Executive director always talks about this time of the week to campers at the closing ceremony. Half jokingly she lets campers know that CYC without them — in the fall and winter on the weekends on summer holidays — just isn’t the same. She points out all of the counselors sitting with them and describes the sad scene of CYC without any campers. Just bored and lonely counselors wandering around the desolate activity areas.

Of course the picture Natalie paints at the ceremony is a pointed on. She’s using a story to illustrate how very important campers are to us here at camp. Without campers and this part is not even a slight exaggeration there really wouldn’t be any reason for us to be here.

That’s why we refer to this time the time after our staff meeting and just before parents start to arrive in their minivans and SUVs to drop off their campers as the time when the "Sunday afternoon blues" strikes. Staff are all waiting around to hear the diesel huff of that old coach bus coming around the bend. We’re all thinking about the Princess Pat (who lived in a tree) little Sally Walker (walkin’ down the street) and the Great Big Moose (his name was Fred he liked to drink his juice in bed). We’re brainstorming cabin names that would fit our Fun with Food theme making some last minute locker decorations or checking over the schedule to make sure that we’ll be able to fit in as many activities as we possibly can. 

In the end though there’s just one cure to the Sunday afternoon blues and we won’t know their names until we all get into a circle take of one shoe and start tossing them around ("Paul Josh" I’ll say as I hand it off. "Josh Nate" he’ll say and so forth).

Camp will be noisy with laughter once again; with the cheers of the victorious target shooter the shrieks of the successful s’mores relay competitor and their low constant beat of the five-gallon drumline. In fact I think that might be the bus I hear right now…