Personality of a Cabin

I've been working on getting together an alumni newsletter to send out to our staff alumni--this is the first one that has been done in years, so I've been trying to figure out what to include, how it should look, and all of that. I've been thinking about what camp news is of interest to alumni; while I'm sure that some will be interested to hear what is happening around camp these days, it seems like what will be of most interest is what their friends from camp are up to.

So, I've been emailing a few alumni recently to see which of them and their friends from camp have had big life events recently they want to share with other alumni. One sent me a picture from his wedding and in identifying the people in the picture, he also told me which cabin they had been a counselor in.

It's been about 10 years since they were on staff, and yet, it was so easy for him to remember what cabin they were all in. It made me think about how each cabin or unit takes on its own personality.

I was always a Cabin 7 counselor (a daisy cabin)--the youngest campers, with counselors that were typically pretty girly and preppy, decorating the cabin with pink and ribbons and daisies.

Cabin 7 was perfect for me--it matched my personality well, and I loved every second of it. Over the years, its been fun to see other Cabin 7 counselors, and the similarities between us that make Cabin 7 that perfect fit. And the same goes for each cabin--there is a certain personality to each cabin, and finding the staff to both fit the cabin and complement each other can be tricky. But when you make that match--that cabin really can become an identifying characteristic for someone. Hearing that someone was a counselor in a particular cabin gives me a pretty good idea of what their personality might be like--another element of that language specific to camp!