Cottage Traditions

Cottage Traditions

 With summer just around the corner and the school year coming to an end it can only mean one thing…COTTAGE TIME!!!  Enjoying summers at the cottage creates lots of fun memories for you and your family.  A big part of that has to do with traditions.  Every family has different traditions that they all look forward to each year.  Traditions are also a great way to get kids excited about, and involved in, family cottage time.  We thought we’d share a few of our favourite old-school customs that bring back a slew of memories, and we’d love to hear yours, too!

 As a child, cottage time was always a treasured experience with my grandparents.  They would load up us kids and fill the entire car with supplies and then make the 4-hour drive up north.  Grandma would always have lots of snacks to keep us quiet (that didn’t work for long but boy were those homemade snacks good!) and make the trip as enjoyable as possible. It could get quite loud with a bunch of kids packed in 

like sardines eager to arrive and start having fun.  One of our favourite traditions was stopping halfway for ice cream at Kawartha Dairy. Nothing beats two scoops of rocky road on a sugar cone!   Once we arrived the first thing we kids always did was run down to the lake and check out the water and start pestering to go swimming.

 I think one of the most interesting traditions that our family shared at our cottage was that anyone who came to visit or stay had to bring a pennant and hang it up.  Our walls were absolutely covered with these pennants from all around Canada and the United States. 

 Another fun tradition that we used to do every year was peel a piece of birch bark off a tree, sign our names and draw a picture on it; the inside of the cottage looked like a forest as the years went on with all the barks lining the shelves.

Some friends of ours have a very competitive family. Cottage time is always about contests and games for them. Whether it’s a pie eating competition, watermelon seed spitting contest, or even frog races, they always have something different going on. They give silly prizes from the dollar store, but nobody participates for the prize, they just do it for the fun and tradition of it (well maybe bragging rights, too).  Remember, when you create traditions that are unique to your family, you create long-lasting memories. 

 With life as busy as it is this day and age it’s even more important to make time and enjoy the special moments, as they are truly priceless.

Rob Heming at Realty Executives on the Bay specializes in tourism accommodation, recreational and multi-residential properties, as well as fine homes and waterfront cottages.