Happy Thanksgiving!

Wreathes wait to be hung below the Illahee theme sign!
Wreathes wait to be hung below the Illahee theme sign!

A Happy Thanksgiving wish to everyone! We hope your time with family and friends was relaxing, re-fueling and, of course…filling! The office scattered in different directions for the holiday – Gretchen to Nashville, Kris and Soup to Virginia, Dave to Ohio and Caroline to Atlanta. Vincent and James celebrated Brevard-style with their respective families and Gordon and Laurie hosted Thanksgiving at camp. Laurie’s parents stayed at Pinecrest and her brother Lee, sister-in-law Katie, niece (and camper) Grace and triplet nephews hung their hats in the Wishing Well. With mountain bikes on loan from Camp High Rocks, we hear the energy was abounding in the Heavenly World!

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. The food is wonderful but most importantly I am grateful for the encouraged opportunity to join around the kitchen table and to pause long enough to share stories, laugh and recognize our multitude of blessings and reasons to be thankful. There are so many! We enjoyed reading several messages from camper’s and staff expressing gratitude toward camp, their camp friends and the simplicity of summers in The Heavenly World. Several official camp countdowns also began surfacing last week – as of the 20th we have 195 days until the June session! Yippee!

Stay tuned this next week. When we arrived to the office this morning it was as if we were greeted by guests in our Curtis porch chairs. Carefully arranged along the bench and in the Adirondack chairs are beautiful Christmas wreaths which will soon adorn our doors as well as the doors of various friends of Camp Illahee. Christmas is rapidly approaching and the next post will indeed be a big treat…It is not the re-emergence of the Sliding Rock Challenge, but is an Illahee debut of another kind!