The Things Campsgiving Taught Us
And how it changed the way we now approach traditional Thanksgiving
In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected.
It was our favorite tradition for five years. We packed up all of our Thanksgiving fixings into the camper and coolers and took off for a different Texas state park (and one year, Louisiana) to escape society and explore while celebrating a traditional Thanksgiving feast.
When we camped at Lake Mineral Wells State Park in November 2020, we had no way of knowing that it would be our last Campsgiving, at least for the foreseeable future, but even though Thanksgiving looks different for us now that we’ve moved back to Indiana, the lessons from those less frantic years of camping during America’s feast day taught us important lessons that have carried over to hosting Thanksgiving in our home.
We don't have to have the house perfect
It’s one of the rules of hospitality, right? We have to have a perfectly clean house before we allow our friends and family, who are supposed to love us without reservation, see how we really live.
Look, I’m not suggesting that I want to have people over with kitchen floors covered in months of food droppings and a pile of dog fur clinging to every corner in the house. And I certainly don’t need guests to see the downstairs bathroom, which is normally used by the eleven-year-old boy, in its standard state. But if we waited for house to be perfect, we would never have people over.
I’ve been slowly savoring Shannon Martin’s new book Start With Hello; she addresses this desire for perfection and the quick cleaning tips that she employs when she knows people are coming over and she only has a short notice. Floors get swept, counters wiped down, and doors to messes closed. This year, with fourteen people coming over for dinner, I focused on the downstairs, employing my family’s help to clean floors, the bathroom, and clear the dining table of my typical paper piles. And you know what? No one cared, I don’t think.
Dinner is ready when it's ready
As a child, I was fed on a regular schedule. Dinner time was always before six and snacks before meals were limited. Now, when the clock approaches 1:00 or 7:00 PM and I’m starting to feel a little irritable, I recognize that I’m getting “hangry.” My kids are the same way. In fact, we frequently joke that our son is a walking Snickers commercial, turning into a child version of the Hulk when he’s gone too long without eating.
While I have never attended a Thanksgiving dinner that started “on time,” camping on Thanksgiving helped to adjust my expectations. When you are cooking an entire Thanksgiving dinner with multiple outdoor devices that can be unpredictable, you have to accept that dinner will be ready when it’s ready and that snacking is not only expected, but necessary. That attitude shift certainly helped this year in our house when one of the two turkeys took longer to cook than everything else. We dug into what we had and then went back for more when the second turkey came off of the grill. And I don’t think I had a genuine panic about food prep once.
I have no interest in Black Friday
Seriously, I don’t care. That first Campsgiving we spent the day after exploring Corpus Christi and didn’t even remember that it was supposed to be one of the biggest shopping days of the year. Two years later we spent the day exploring New Orleans. Some years we traveled on Friday and other years we hiked and explored nature. We were practicing #optoutside on Black Friday before it became a huge campaign.
Yesterday I did go to a local boutique that supports women escaping sex trafficking and abusive relationships because they offered a mind-blowing 40% off for an hour in the morning. I bought a couple items for me and two Christmas gifts and I called it good. We took the kids to see Wakanda Forever and then I came home and walked the dogs before Jeff and I walked the empty paved streets of the new neighborhood that is planned across the field from us. Even my one attempt at online shopping was a complete failure because everything I wanted was sold out and I just accepted it as something I would just have to wait to buy later.
And did we feel like we were missing out on anything special? Not even a little bit.
Traditions change, but we take the lessons of each tradition with us as we move from one stage of life to the next. I’m thankful for what we learned in our years camping for the holidays and maybe some day we can bring back the tradition, when we have more time to travel further south. Until the, we’ll just enjoy hosting, recovering, and relaxing at home.
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I started Campsgiving with my husband when we lived in Florida. We rarely made it home for holidays and so camping sounded like a great idea. We kept it up mostly after we moved back, though some years we do something different. I love the simplicity of it, the idea of just being with people you love instead of making a ton of food!
Our family started alternating a traditional at-home Thanksgiving with travel. Our most memorable Thanksgiving was 2009 in Santiago, Chile, during a year of round-the-word travel. A wire in my 11-year-old daughter's braces broke, so we had to walk across the city to Santiago's graduate school of orthodontia, where a professor demonstrated to several students how to repair her braces, for free! Then we ate dinner at a seafood place with a raw bar and have since incorporated shellfish into our Thanksgiving dinners to remember that funny, strange Thanksgiving. But I do still value a family gathering with a home-cooked meal, along with the tradition of going around (youngest to oldest) and saying what we're thankful for. I also try to do a Turkey Trot run, either as part of an organized race or on my own. I feel pressure the weekend following to get up Christmas decorations, and this is where I've decided to cut myself some slack -- no need to rush getting the tree, wreath, and lights up; enjoy the process. Thanks for your post that made me think through these traditions!