Every summer, Camp Nebagamon hosts a birthday party for everyone, all on the exact same night. It’s loud, it’s messy, and it’s one of the best examples of the kind of unmitigated fun we have here up at camp. The tradition actually started back in the early 1940s as a solution to World War II sugar rationing. Unable to bake individual birthday cakes all summer long, camp consolidated the celebrations into a single evening. Today, that wartime tradition has evolved into one of the biggest blowout bashes of the season. (To be clear – if your son has a birthday at camp, we definitely celebrate on his big day as well!)
Last night at the All Camp Birthday, we started with a big taco dinner put on by our kitchen staff, many of whom are from Puebla, Mexico. These members of our community are eager to share with us recipes from their family traditions, and the menu changes a little bit every year depending on who is on our staff. During dinner, we sat by birth month – January all together here, February there, etc. We served – what else? – enormous birthday cakes for dessert, and this year we were joined by a camp alum for a performance of a few special camp songs for the whole camp.
After eating dinner, the pace of the party picked up exponentially with giant versions of your favorite birthday party activities. Campers got their face painted, made balloon animals, and threw water balloons at one another. We mixed up a concoction of extremely sudsy bubble solution to blow giant bubbles with a 6 foot bubble wand. We shot water balloons from our giant slingshot off the hill to see if campers could catch them, though almost all the balloons just exploded on contact. And the two marquee events are probably the dunk tank and the slip ‘n’ slime. Village Directors and administrators took turns sitting in the dunk tank throughout the evening, and campers had a chance to try and pop an enormous, freezing water balloon over our heads. There was a lot of lighthearted heckling back and forth between campers and staff, and invariably it ended with the admin soaking wet and regretting their taunts. The camper who successfully dunked me did an NFL-fine-worthy celebration around our Lower Diamond.
The slip ‘n’ slime is maybe our messiest activity all year. We mixed up buckets of movie-set-quality slime and let campers go headfirst down a tarp covered in some of the stickiest, messiest slime you can imagine. Then we hosed the kids off… and they went back to run the slide again. It’s really something you could only find at summer camp – whose birthday party back home is going to have Nickelodeon-style slime?
That’s what last night really felt like across the board – this could all only happen at summer camp, and dare I say, at Camp Nebagamon. Perhaps the most illustrative example of this magic evening was not any of the activities, the band performance, or the celebratory dinner… Instead, it was the party hats. Just for fun this year, we bought a big box of goofy, shiny party hats and handed them out to anyone who wanted one. I expected our staff to get into the hats, because that’s who our staff are. They get excited about doing something silly, and the party hats were fun for staff to latch onto.
And then during dinner, I noticed that nearly every camper in sight was wearing a party hat. Some had two on their head like horns. Another camper had collected at least ten from his buddies and had party hats at every angle on his head, even covering his face. It was a little goofy detail on a night full of silliness, but as I walked around the evening, the party hats told the tale of the night.
Plenty of things we do at camp are a little goofy and require our campers to let down their guard a little bit and buy in. On our Cruiser Day last week, our Logger campers suspended disbelief and really believed that they were chasing around gold bandits for Klondike Day. The bandits were counselors dressed up in over the top costumes, but for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, the Swamper/Logger Hill was the wild, wild west. Our campers totally bought in. Tonight during our Pizza Night dance party, campers will sing along to Miley Cyrus, the Backstreet Boys, and finish off with a rousing chorus of “Let It Go” from the decade-old kids movie Frozen. Unashamed, they totally buy in to the songs and belt them out as loud as they possibly can. And later next week is The Grand Pursuit, our all-camp competition day themed on the voyageurs, french fur traders from the 18th century, and our campers will dress the part, donning sashes and screaming chants in French to will their team to victory.
The Birthday Party last night is just one example of the attitude with which our campers approach camp. As an outsider at Nebagamon, all our silly traditions and frivolity might look a little goofy, but once you’re on the inside, it looks exactly like summer camp should. The rules here are different than at home or school. Camp Nebagamon is a place where campers can let their hair down, fully buy in, and express themselves freely. It’s a place where no one worries about looking cool or feeling silly. It’s a place where everyone puts on party hats, drenches themselves in slime, and enjoys every single second of being a kid at camp.
All is well in the Northwoods!