My favorite letter to home this year had to be:

Dear Mom,

(Younger sister’s name) is embarrassing!
Send money!
(Name) is my new BFF!!!!

Luv ya!

Yes, that was the entire letter, including the accurate amount and placement of exclamation points.

On the last day, I won the draw for another free week at camp. We gave it to my friend who had actually enjoyed his week.

Any bets on whether the second kid refused to leave once Mommy and Daddy got there?

I never went to a camp that was more than a week, so never wrote letters home, wouldn’t have occurred to me anyway. Though my brother and I would send some funny letters to our mother when she was away for Army training.

Anyway, at the camp I went to letters are required once a week (most kids are there for a little less than four weeks). However, there is nothing stopping you from putting a blank piece of paper in an envelope and handing that in, and I know I wasn’t the only kid who did that at least once and when I was in charge of kids (usually older ones) I suggested it to them a couple of times. That’s after suggesting all kinds of other things, of course, but it was on me to get them to write and if they were really that uninspired, there’s nothing I could do short of writing for them, which is pointless.

Of course the younger kids almost always write letters like the ones pictured here. Even if they don’t mean to point out to their parents all the bad things that happened and aren’t asking to come home, they end up sounding hilariously bad – what I mean is, the things that kids emphasize usually make things sound worse than they are, even if the kid was actually relating something they liked.

The thing is that now I love writing long letters, as you can tell anytime I make a comment on boingboing (it’s worse on slashdot…) because I inevitably go into multiple long paragraphs. I think that came partially from my camp experience because getting letters from your parents (or whoever – from girls was better) while there was one of the greatest things possible. A friend who is a girl went to (and worked) at a nearby girls’ camp and I had exchanged mail with her, which impressed everyone else at the all-boy’s camp I went to ;)

Watch any movie about camp (Meatballs is a good one) and you usually get a very good idea about what it’s like, and why kids are inspired to write letters like these. Most of the time, it’s because they’re too busy having fun, not because they’re miserable. And it’s almost always a positive experience, even if the kid was miserable the whole time and despite all the shenanigans that go on (Meatballs is only *slightly* exaggerated!) – perhaps I should say it’s *because* of all the shenanigans, which are usually more memorable than the actual camp program :)

hahahaha

I was at camp just once. No showers, just a lake; I had a plaster cast on my arm and couldn’t swim, so I got pretty filthy.

I will say it though: EGGS! EGGS! EGGS!

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/109/Notes-on-Camp