Campfires have a bit of history in our relationship. My favorite story is our honeymoon. We had a hashtag #kubafanie, so my husband sketched it into a sausage and roasted it over the bonfire. Unfortunately, as a vegetarian in the mountainside of the Czech Republic, I was not as lucky to find something as suitable to roast on a bonfire stick….I stuck an onion on a stick and held it over the fire. Well, it turns out onions are plentiful in the Czech Republic, and they are a vegetarian food, but they don’t roast well on a campfire! I may not have eaten that healthy on that trip, but I had a great time 🙂
Another Czech story is s’mores! Czechs don’t know what they are. Firstly, Czechs send their kids with their school to the mountains for a week in the winter and in the spring. It is called School in Nature, and even though it is much more exhausting for the teachers, I find it very beneficial for the children. As an American preschool teacher, we introduced our students on our spring trip to s’mores. It’s such a pleasure to observe a child eating a s’more for the first time. It’s messy, it’s delicious, and as it became a tradition on our School in Nature trips, it became the most looked forward to night of the whole week away.
What is that, you ask? a week away with preschool children? Yes! It happens from preschool through high school in private schools and public, spring and winter. Teachers and students will go away for what they call “school in nature.” This means that learning still takes place, lessons still happen, but they spend more time in the outdoors with ski lessons, hiking trips, and time in nature.
Ok, back on s’mores, my kids also love them. Most recently, we were not well stocked and were out of the chocolate and graham crackers, so they have been eating roasted marshmallows by the handful! Today, Grandma bought chocolate stuffed marshmallows; seems like we’re in for a treat tonight 🙂
And one last thought is the smell of campfires. They smell like summer and they smell like camping. They smell like s’mores to me and sausages to my husband. Well, we have been on the road for three weeks, and I no longer want to smell them! Everything I own smells like smoke, I have a washing machine but I hang the clothes out to dry and they smell like smoke. I guess if we’re going to live a camping lifestyle, we have to embrace the smells that go with it 😉
