Friday nights are campfire nights!
Once a week, units of campers (plus a few groups or departments of staff) perform skits on the campfire stage to entertain the whole community. Campfires are one of our favorite evening activities because everyone gets to take part in the fun together!
Campfire skits often incorporate camp songs – and we always close the night with singing!
Every campfire is different, but there’s usually a plethora of silly skits, complete with costumes and props from the drama shed. The hosting unit typically provides a unifying storyline that unfolds over the course of the evening in several parts, broken up by invitations to other units to come up and perform their prepared skits. In addition, sometimes the hosts will initiate a “brown bag,” where a group of campers is called upon to improvise a skit using all the props contained in a secret brown paper bag, or a “talk-off,” in which two contestants are challenged to talk to the audience about an assigned topic until one of them runs out of things to say. And, in true Nor’wester campfire tradition, there are always plenty of puns!
Linking arms and singing with your unitmates is a special moment at the end of every campfire.
We close every campfire by linking arms and singing “The Golden Day is Dying,” a folksong that has been sung at the end of campfires at Camp since 1935. Although COVID-prevention protocols this summer require that we only link arms with the people in our pods and that pods remain masked and distanced from one another during the singing, it’s still a beautiful moment of communal connection.
Campfires are one of our “all camp activities” which engage the whole camp community.
Following “The Golden Day,” units are dismissed one by one to go back to the showerhouses and get ready for bed. The remaining units continue to sing together, until just a small group of singers remain and the strains of voices raised in a cappella harmony grow fainter as the sun sinks lower beyond the horizon. Then it’s off to bed for everyone, with the jokes and memories from the campfire lingering long past the end of the night.