Alicornutopia

Hmm, I seem to have started a trend. I guess I'm glad to know that the forum is not prominently composed of highly religious types? Not that I was expecting anything of the sort, but I'm a little more cautious about insulting peoples' beliefs now. A *little* more.

Travel stuff: the biggest was the whole "lived on a sailboat for about 3.5 years from 15 to 18" part. Tons of stories to tell there, some of which can easily be adapted for younger people (my sister is three years younger, some of the other kids we met were as young as 6 or so). Cruising like that is more a "lifestyle" thing than a "here's a vacation we took as kids" thing, though. I met families that had been doing it for decades (my parents are *still* out there, 12.5 years after we moved aboard, and they did it for 7 years in the 80s as well). Still, if you want some stories of exotic locations to travel to, different ways of living, "kids being kids" in an unfamiliar context, and so on, I've plenty to share...

Random other points that stuck in my memories:
South Africa has penguins, really good meat pies, and cities where you install bars in your windows before you install glass. There was a giraffe randomly grazing on a tree at the side of the highway, totally casual-like, only a little ways out of town (not in a game park or anything). From the top of Table Mountain you can see the border between the Indian and Atlantic oceans; they are different colors!
The Okavango Delta is full of shallow waterways (our canoes were propelled with poles pushing off the bottom, not with paddles) and water so clean you can drink it (tasted kind of earthy) right through water lily straws if you wanted, even! The animals were everywhere, and we had to be careful not to camp anywhere that was a path where elephants or hippos go at night.
In New Zealand, there's a cave with a river running through it that you can ride down in inner tubes. One part of the cave has glow-worms that live on the ceiling and look kind of spooky with all artificial lights off.
Australia is full of really mean critters. Even koalas have huge, sharp claws. Kangaroo is surprisingly tasty. In the summer, at least along the east coast of Aus, it gets bloody hot but you can't go swimming in the ocean because there's box jellyfish, or in the rivers because of crocodiles. The outback looks a lot like Mars, or at least like the mental image I had of Mars at 14, if you remove the wallabies and such.

So many more stories, but dammit, it's really late again. Le sigh...

Kappa wrote:In the vein of Born Atheist stories: I'm told that when I was a very small child my parents took me to a wedding in a church, and the small children were all ushered off to a room somewhere to be kept busy with some manner of religious instruction while the grown-ups did sophisticated grown-up things. I'm told I came rocketing out of there yelling at the top of my lungs, "MOMMY! DADDY! THEY'RE TRYING TO BRAINWASH ME!"

This is the cutest thing. :D

I was really a not-vocal lonely type?

I expressed my atheists opinions once, my mother looked at me like I was a disgusting thing and I never expressed them again to my family.

No, my name is not Debbie Downer.

The annual rituals. Big ones in my family:

• Extended family Easter
  • An uncle and the oldest children go hide eggs around, then the younger children are let out in turns by age to find them.
  • The past couple years, the eggs sometimes have clues to a team treasure hunt.
• Christmas presents
  • My immediate family would all go to the store together. We'd split into groups, then meet up and recombine, to pick out presents for one another while keeping them all a surprise. Without any cell phones, we'd have to schedule meet-up spots. Most complicated while we were four kids, none of us yet allowed to wander the store on our own.
  • Similar adventures ensued when wrapping - coming and going to get everything wrapped while spoiling as little as we could. We'd usually need a parent to help with the knife.
  • Our ritual for opening the presents: the youngest picks a present from under the tree, figures out who it's for, and brings it to them to open. Once we've seen that present opened, the person who received it goes to the tree to pick the next one, and so forth through the pile. (If the present's for you yourself, then if possible you have to pick a different one instead.)
  • For extended family we have the express version, where the two youngest hand out the presents as fast as they can decipher the names.

My family's Christmas shopping tradition, since my mom was pretty poor while I was growing up, was that we would go to Toys 'R' Us or a department store or the like, and we'd go around the whole store and I'd fill a cart up with *everything* that I wanted. Then I'd go wait in the car while she picked out which things to buy. That way I would get the fun of picking out everything and the fun anticipation of not knowing what I'd get, yet would always be guaranteed to get something I wanted, while she could control exactly how much money she spent and only get what she could actually afford to get me (and I understood that we could only spend so much - discussions of budgeting and cost vs value were part of every shopping trip save that one).

Our Christmas gift-wrapping tradition is that we would all wrap up our gifts to each other, but instead of writing "To: So-and-so; From: Santa" or "To: Whoever; From: Me", we'd make up silly names for who bought them the gift. Often the name on the "From" would be some sort of clue about what the gift was. For example, if it was a book, the label might say it was a gift from the main character or from the author. We'd also throw in completely random fun ones like "Elvis Presley" or "The Spirit of Giving" or "The Thing Under The Bed" and so on. This made opening gifts into more of a fun game, and having the gift-givers anonymized meant that no one had to feel embarrassed not being able to give enough gifts, or not having a gift for a particular person, or not giving a 'good enough' gift. Everyone just got gifts and we didn't worry too much about who'd got them for us.

Those a both nice things that I like. Nawww.

And am also noting them away for future reference.

My family had a fairly rigid set of Christmas traditions when I was a kid. We never put the decorations up, or listened to Christmas music before the first of December. On Christmas eve, my paternal grandfather would take as many of my dad's relatives as were in town out for dinner a a restaurant (we still do that but my grandfather is dead, so my grandmother pays instead), then we would all gather and watch the cartoon of How The Grinch Stole Christmas while drinking eggnog. Then, just before bed my dad would read The Night Before Christmas.

On Christmas morning we had to wait until mom and dad were awake before emptying the stockings, then we had to wait until after breakfast and any guests were also awake before opening presents from the family members present. Then my mom would make Christmas dinner and sometimes there'd be more presents to open.

One year my brother and I snuck downstairs very early in the morning to try to open stockings early and dad caught us and made us go back upstairs until 7 o''clock. That's when I taught my brother to read a digital clock.

- Inventing a fictional universe and convincing my younger friend it is real and then using it as leverage in convincing her to play by my rules (it was a mish mash of every magic system I knew, it was invented when I was around 9, I can dig up details on request)
- Spying on neghbours
- Coming up with codes/ciphers/invisible inks/conlangs and communicating in those
- Trying to write the next Harry Potter
- Imitating voices and handwriting so perfectly you could counterfeit any adult's consent
- Being caught doing something you're not supposed to and coming up with a cover story on the spot
- Guessing people's passwords just because you're curious

Those last few sound Milesish

They really do.