We went for several years without TV in our house. Having grown up with no electric, running water, or indoor toilets, this was not hard for me. I remember the best times of our lives playing games with my family. The new game Apples to Apples is a favorite (even of the members of our family who still have no electric). My cousin and I have laughed ourselves out of our chairs several times. We use a small electric lamp on a small table instead of the oil lamp. We also used to play “dictionary”. A specified person would spend a week combing the dictionaries for strange words. They would write the correct definition on a scrap of paper and leave the others blank or provide a made up definition. They would do this for about ten definitions or so. We would sit around trying to guess which was the correct definition. (before you accuse us of destroying trees, the scraps were the backs of paper that had already been used, and afterword they got recycled and turned into greeting cards, but I digress)
Milles Bournes is a great family game, or do as my cousin does and build your own board game. She uses the cardboard from cereal boxes for the materials. We used to play a game with guests called “tell me a story”. Living in the frozen north where it is dark for months, you cannot always provide sufficient light for games, so we would tell stories. Someone would pick a topic like: “the biggest trouble I got into as a child was…”
Little ones love this game because it bridges the generation gap. They realize that mum, dad, grandmum, grandpop, uncles, aunties, librarians, EVERYONE, got into mischief as a child. We sang songs together and even made up songs. My dad was a champ at giving old songs new lyrics–he was Wierd Al long before it was cool.
We have TV now that the kids are grown and I don’t always like it. We have TV free times in the mornings and specified evenings (in our case it is for meditation,scripture readings, and worship as well as family time)
I found the whole concept of a project called “no impact man” kind of strange, because my family has had very low impact for generations, and it seemed to me like just the way things are.
This post was submitted by Michelle Chamberlin.
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