the green spot blog

Hello, friends! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas, celebrating the birth of Jesus and enjoying the company of your family and friends! Here at Evergreen, we're basking in the snow and cold. All of us staff had the opportunity to take off for a couple of days to spend time with family and friends -- we were in Medicine Hat, Edmonton, Spruce View, Red Deer, Calgary and Maple Ridge (obviously, not all of us were in all of those places)! Things have picked right back up again on site on Boxing Day, when a group of 30 youth pulled in for trail rides, climbing, games, chapels and general fun and excitement. Thank you for you generous responses to my "Yearend Giving" blog post . I have been repeatedly wowed by people's generousity and their commitment to ministry here at Evergreen! So, thank-you! Summer 2010 registration will be available online really, really soon (by January 6, if not before): check our main website, www.camp-evergreen.com, to register for summer ...

Are you still thinking about where to do your yearend giving? Well, you should consider us! Camp Evergreen is a registered, not-for-profit organization. 2009 has been a great year at Evergreen -- we had 646 adorable, hilarious and totally rad campers this summer (interestingly, the exact same number we had in 2008). Our spring and fall were booked solidly with guest groups -- fun, friendly guest groups no less! We had great seasonal staff, and a sweet crew that's staying through the winter. We are looking forward to our first official foray into winter outdoor education with a guest group in early January. We received some fantastic gifts, including a van full of flour , new aluminum canoes, a scanner, snowshoes and a new gator. The one sad spot? General donations! Donations have come in below what we budgetted for consistently this year. Can you help us change that, in these last two weeks of 2009? We know that it has been a hard year for a lot of folks, with recession w...

If you live in Alberta, you know that the weather was not the greatest last weekend. The Calgary Police apparently responded to 110 accidents within four hours on Friday. The highways were ... scary. As a result, we cancelled the Christmas Banquet, sort of. Instead of our planned 60+ guests, we had a quieter night with 25 friends: of our neighbours, who all still came out, along with two Medicine Hat couples, one Red Deer family and a Coaldale couple. We salute you all for your bravery, and thank God you made it here and back safely! Even with a much smaller group than initially planned, we had a great night: yummy food (thanks, Ken!), good visiting, happy carolling (thanks, Colleen, Sydney and Kiah!) and some of us played fun games after dinner. Mmmm, dinner. Left: Sydney and Colleen lead Christmas carols. Right: Kiah joins the Reimer ladies to help with actions for "Away in a Manger" Since we didn't get to say it to everyone we'd hoped to at the banquet: thank ...

I don't actually know if I have the words to explain how excited I am to announce that Robin Jones Gunn is going to be our speaker at Ladies' Retreat, from April 16-18, 2010. Indulge me while I tell you why I'm so excited, okay? I grew up reading Robin Jones Gunn's Christy Miller series . The Sierra Jensen and Todd & Christy: The College Years series came out when I was done high school; I've read them all (Doug & Tracy got married on my birthday in the sixth Sierra Jensen, With this Ring , which I thought was pretty great). I've read the Glenbrooke series more than once and have recently been reading Sisterchicks books , even though they're about women quite a bit older than me. Even more recently, I've been reading the new Katie Weldon books as they come out. This summer, I had my mom express mail two copies of the third Katie Weldon book for Ashley and me the day they arrived in the bookstores. Anyway, shortly after I finished my BA, I...

As you may know, Camp Evergreen is hosting its first ever Three-on-Three Pond Hockey Tournament on January 9 . Huzzah! It's going to be very, very, very fun. And we still have space for a couple more teams, if you're interested (call me, Kerry, at 403-638-4230, if you want more information). We're working on the three ice surfaces we'll be using for the Tournament. I was starting to worry that it would never get cold enough to make good ice, but God has provided us with wonderfully freezing weather and the ice is underway! Dave, Emily, Colter and Erin have been flooding the "upstairs" rink, and yesterday, some of us broke in the ice. Wanna pretend you were there?