In December of 2001, my parents packed a borrowed tent, two sleeping bags rated for temperatures far warmer than they'd face, a camp stove, and approximately too much food into the back of a Chevy Suburban and drove three hours north of Denver to a campsite on a frozen lake. There were two of them. They were twenty-nine and thirty-one years old. They were, by their own subsequent admission, wildly underprepared.
They have been going back every December since. This year will be the twenty-third trip. There will be fourteen of us.
The Origin Story
My mother tells the origin story differently depending on who's asking. The practical version: my father had read an article about winter camping and decided it sounded interesting, and my mother agreed with significantly less enthusiasm than she later admitted to having. The romantic version: they were newly married, broke, and wanted an adventure that didn't require a resort reservation. The true version, which my father revealed at my wedding toast, is that my mother had told him she thought most vacations were forgettable and she wanted to do something they'd never forget.
"We wanted to do something that would mean something," she says. "We didn't know it would turn into this."
The Rule
The rule was established on the second year, when my mother brought a Discman and my father brought a portable radio, and they both agreed the music felt wrong. Out in the quiet of a frozen December forest, with the ice cracking on the lake and owls calling at night, anything electronic felt like an intrusion. The rule became: no screens. No phones (eventually), no tablets, no laptops, no Kindles. Books are permitted. Board games are encouraged. Conversation is mandatory.
The no-phones rule has become the most contentious aspect of the tradition as the family has grown to include teenagers. Every year there is negotiation. Every year the rule holds. Every year, without exception, the teenagers admit by the second day that they don't miss it.
What Fourteen People Do for Three Days on a Frozen Lake
More than you'd think. There is ice fishing, which requires patience and produces more laughter than fish. There is cross-country skiing on the trails above the lake. There is a family snowball fight that follows consistent, elaborate rules developed over two decades. There is the cooking rotation, where every family unit is assigned one meal and judged harshly but lovingly on its execution. There are the evening fires that last until the cold drives everyone into sleeping bags, with stories told in the dark — some funny, some serious, some that have been told so many times they've become family mythology.
There is the morning ritual: wake before sunrise, make coffee on the camp stove, carry it to the lakeside in heavy mugs, watch the light change. This is non-negotiable. Even the teenagers participate without complaint, because it turns out that watching dawn break over a frozen lake while drinking hot coffee with your family in below-freezing silence is, in fact, one of the better things a human being can do with a morning.
What the Tradition Has Held
Twenty-two years of December camping trips have served as the connective tissue of our family through everything that life has thrown at it: two divorces (neither in our immediate family, but affecting cousins who kept coming anyway), three job losses, one serious illness, deaths of grandparents, cross-country moves, the arrival of seven grandchildren, the addition of three spouses. The camping trip has been a fixed point around which everything else orbits.
My therapist once asked me what I thought my parents' greatest parenting achievement was. Without hesitation I said: "Making us feel like family was something worth showing up for." The December trips are the physical form of that lesson. You don't skip them for inconvenience. You don't skip them because you're busy. You pack your coldest sleeping bag and you go, because the people are there, and that is sufficient reason.
The New Generation
My daughter is four. She came for the first time last December, bundled into a sleeping bag liner inside a sleeping bag inside a thermal layer that made her look approximately spherical. She was not impressed by the cold. She was enormously impressed by the fire, by the ice, by her grandmother's hot chocolate recipe, and by the fact that when you breathe out in December in Colorado, you make your own cloud.
By the second night, she was asking if we could do this forever. We told her yes. That is the plan.
The list of people who want to join has now exceeded the practical capacity of the campsite. We have had to establish a reservation system for extended family members. My parents find this deeply hilarious, given that this started as two cold young people and a borrowed tent.
— Elena Rodriguez, Denver, CO
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