A Camper for a Camper and other Christmas Stories

What family, temporarily living in campers, would give the one permanent camp child a camper? This. One. of course.

Poor child. Her own personal Barbie/baby doll camper as small as Grandmay and Poppa's. She's living in a camper the size of her new (in process of being built) house. And her dolls will have to share the smallest camper available to dolls. Wait, it's the size of the camper I'm sleeping in tonight. 

It's been a while since we've had a baby to open gifts. What fun! Doesn't the look on her face tell the story?

At some point we were finished opening all the gifts and moved on to supper. One of the advantages of having Will and crew living in the house is that they did the cooking. And it was delicious!

Earlier in the day Richard and I attended mass and spent some quiet time before the chaos began. When the kids arrived in the afternoon, we took photos in a sleigh that Will made just for this purpose. It started out a two-dimensional drawing, but he kept adding to the idea until it became a three-dimensional sleigh with a bench for sitting and two crazy log reindeer. 

Rich's parents were with us for gift-giving and supper, but it began "getting late" as soon as we served dessert. We love to play family games, so I made a few plans for after they left. Unfortunately they can't handle the noise and chaos of family games. Two of the games we played are below. The first was a hoot! Everyone wanted in on this game!

Treasure Chase
Necessary items: plastic wrap (Saran or Cling); small tokens, such as pony tail holders, candies, gum, lip balm, and so on. I also gathered a few odd things from around the house: safety pins, bobby pins, paper clips, zip ties, coins, ribbon. Anything small will work but avoid sharp, pointed objects.  

Start with a medium-size prize and wrap it in a wad of plastic wrap to form a ball. Then add more "sheets" of wrap around that to add to the ball. Cutting the wrap into sheets means the players will have to pick at the wrap to find the beginning of each. With each piece of wrap, add tokens enclosing them and pressing down to make the wrap stick to itself. It takes hours to use up a 300' roll of wrap. Several hours. Eventually I had a ball of tokens and wrap about the size of a volley ball. 


To play one person races to unwrap the items while the next player throws a die. We had already decided that the number to switch on would be three. When the player rolled a three, he took the ball and began trying to get items out while the next player tried to roll a three. It was such fun to see how the kids played. Some of us, it turns out, cheat. I loved trying to keep Lane from getting the ball from me. He's 6' tall, so reaching over me was not a concern. 

For the most part our games have no rules, and everyone just plays for fun. Some of our prizes were useless. For example, I included a sewing machine foot from an old machine. The idea is that no one knew what to expect, but it was fun to find out. I hate to admit but had any of the prizes been expensive, someone may have been hurt.


Candy Cane Catch
To play this game, you'll need candy canes, ribbon and prizes. Divide into teams of two players. One player (standing on a chair) drops the candy cane to the second player (sitting on the chair with back to player one). The player holds the ribbon out-stretched and tries to catch the candy cane on the ribbon. They may communicate but may not touch each other. The first team to catch the candy cane wins the prize.

You can find directions to both of these games on the internet. I found the first one here.  And though I don't remember where I found the Candy Cane Catch (my title), there are many holiday family games at Happy Home Fairy.