We are going camping this weekend, which happens to also be Summer Solstice, traditionally known as Midsummer. The kids and I would like our family to celebrate this natural holiday (I had to assure Sean that we wouldn’t do anything pagan). I’ve come up with a lot of ideas, but we’ll end up just choosing a few. Here are my ideas:

            DURING THE DAY:

• Nature Crafting:  gather natural materials and make a sculpture, a fairy home, a crown or necklace, toy swords or spears, etc.
• Nature Exploring:  explore the woods/area where we’re camping!
• Tales of Robin Hood:  read a chapter from our current read-aloud, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
• Practice archery, or other rangering skills such as tracking, scouting, identifying herbs, plants or trees, etc.
• Play group games, the parents joining with the children

            EVENING:

• Build a good fire, cook supper over it and have sweets (s’mores).
• Watch the sunset on this the longest day of the year, and bid farewell to the sun
• Around the fire, share our favorite things about summer and what we’re grateful for
• Around the fire, share a memorized poem, song, instrumental music, or story
• Once it gets dark, dance in the moonlight wearing our fairy crowns we've made, to a simple summer song we can sing together
• After the dance, throw our fairy crowns into the dying fire 

We won’t try to do all of these on our first celebration, plus it looks like another family will be joining us, and I don’t know them well, so we’ll keep it simple. I think this year we’ll just do:

1. Camping
2. Nature Exploring
3. Nature Crafting
4. Learn a group game to play (Kick the Can?)
5. Bonfire, supper & s’mores
6. Share our favorite things about summer

I'll bring the Robin Hood book and archery equipment just in case. 

Here’s the tricky thing. To be traditional, we would have to (1) celebrate Midsummer on the evening of June 23^rd (in the olden days the longest day of the year was June 24), and (2) have our main celebration on the evening before, which would be Friday, June 20^th. But since we’ll just be driving up and setting up our camp on that night, I think we’ll just celebrate all day and evening on June 21^st. That’s a modern tradition (celebrating on the day and evening of, instead of the evening before), but it feels right to me. After all, it’s actually on the longest day of the year!