I read an article the other day that promised to give tips for money management for these troubled times. Surprisingly, one of the tips was to take a family vacation. The logic behind this was that in times when money is scarce, we cut back on the fun and tend to more practical matters, but it said that memories of good times with your family will last longer than anything else on which you spend money.
Now I’m not advocating an expensive vacation when you aren’t able to make the mortgage payment, but the author did have a point. I remember after my youngest brother’s accidental death that that my mother read a magazine article about a family who was planning to remodel the bathroom. When the oldest son was drafted into the military, they took the money and went on a memorable vacation instead.
That mother recounted how many times in letters from her soldier son he referenced the memories of that trip and how much it had meant to him. She said she couldn’t imagine him writing home saying how much he missed their newly-remodeled bathroom.
Vacations and outings are magical things. Talk to your children, siblings, friends about their most memorable family vacation moments. They aren’t the events or the places as much as the funny things that happen along the way.
I remember a family camping trip with my parents and siblings at Bear Lake. First my mother slapped my father on his sunburned back because a mosquito had landed on him. Then one landed on his fly. My mother was merely trying to shoo it, but dad said, “Don’t even think about it, Ruth. Haven’t you done enough damage already?”
While we were all laughing about that, someone remarked that funny things like this happen in sets of three. My sister-in-law picked up a spray can from the table and said, “The mosquitoes aren’t going to get me,” and proceeded to spray Pam cooking spray all over her legs.
My stepchildren all remember an outing to Lagoon where the van broke down and Dad got chased by a bull as he was going through a field, trying to get to a nearby house for help. That’s one of the great things about vacation memories. Even the little mishaps are looked back on fondly. The “crisis + time = humor” equation seems particularly applicable to family vacations.
When we visited Becky and Josh when they were stationed in the south of Spain, we took a side trip to Gibraltar one day. They have large monkeys that roam freely, because the belief is that if the monkeys are free, Gibraltar will always be under the rule of the United Kingdom.
I was trying to get the attention of one of the monkeys so my husband could take a picture, so I gave my water bottle a squeeze to get his attention. The next thing I knew, I had a giant monkey on my lap and three people screaming at me, “Give him the water bottle!” We don’t have a picture of this magical experience, because my husband was actually more focused on getting the monkey off my lap than capturing this “Kodak moment,” something for which I will forever be grateful. But we never look at those pictures of Gibraltar without that story surfacing.
Magic memories include small things that can tie people together. My husband had our little granddaughter Lucy on his shoulders watching fireworks out the window looking for “sparklies.” They still talk about the sparklies.
On my wall I have a picture of me and little Lucy on the Dumbo ride at Disneyland. On her wall she has a montage of photos from our trip to California. Recently we were in Sacramento for our son’s graduation from law school. Lucy, now four, called me, and when I told her we were in California, a sad little voice said, “Grandma, why would you go to Disneyland without me?”
When our daughter Becky had shoulder surgery, I spent a month helping her with her little girl. Ellie and I had so much fun. We turned a cardboard box into a haunted Halloween fort. We made up a new song the day her mother was in surgery – the mommy song, easily adding new verses for daddy and Grandma and Grandpa, aka Meemaw and Beebaw.
Everywhere we went, she wanted to sing it. I’d hear that little voice pipe up from the backseat. “Again.” I recorded myself singing it and put the recording device inside a teddy bear for her as a parting gift.
(Build-a-Bear sells the recording devices, and speaking of budgets, I occasionally buy one and put it inside a teddy bear I already have.)
Becky said she listened to it so often, she ran the battery down.
Doing something we might not regularly do to connect with a loved one can have surprising results. After his mission, my son Scott came home to Hawaii rather than Florida, which was his pre-mission home. I was trying to figure out something we could do together when I ran across the information that there was going to be a Star Trek convention in Oahu.
We flew over, and I fully expected to be bored and out of place, but I had so much fun! Many of the talks were full of wisdom, and I told Scott it was almost as inspirational as our recent stake conference had been.
If you can’t afford a vacation, you can still take an outing – a picnic in the park, a drive through the mountains, a game of croquet in the backyard. My stepson, Rob, who is here for the summer, recently joined me in the backyard in what I call a “poor man’s hot tub.” We sat out there in the inflatable kiddy pool and relaxed and visited. I told him that I was making up for not being there during his childhood.
In tough times, fun together with the people we love should never be a budget cut.