My family went camping with the families of two of my good friends last weekend and we all had a great time. There were 13 of us in all, six adults and seven yard apes. We only camped for two days but my family alone needed an SUV full of stuff to do it.

Loading all that stuff into the vehicle always makes me think back to my early college years when I would move home from college for the summer and all of my stuff would fit in the back seat of my tiny little car. My “car” was actually a glorified roller skate powered by two geriatric squirrels and a hamster with a club foot.

It was small but everything I owned fit in it with room for at least one medium sized hitchhiker and his pet chimp, if he happened to have one. Now it takes Noah and bunch of cubics to go on a two day camping trip 30 minutes from where we live. Its nobodies fault, except for possibly my wife and kids, because I only brought two things.

I brought my guitar and a coon skin cap. You can brush and floss your teeth with the tail of the cap, place it over a rock for a firm but ergonomically correct pillow, use it as a cereal bowl, and I’ve heard some people actually wear them.

As for the guitar well it’s uses are endless, firewood, strings for snaring wild game (using the hat as bait of course), cereal bowl, wash basin, tennis racket, fishing net, and I’ve heard some people actually play them.

It seems we need so much stuff nowadays, and if we don’t need it we want it, and if we don’t want it we think someone else might. Whatever happened to the days when all you got for Christmas was an orange and you were happy to get that? I’ve heard of them days but never was on the receiving end of such a Christmas miracle.

I think it’s because kids back then had what every kid always wants for Christmas, a pony. Everyone had pony’s back in those “all I got for Christmas was an orange” days. The parents were sitting around putting their Christmas list together, see the kids frolicking around with their ponies, and think “They’ve got a pony what gift could possibly rise above a pony?”

I’ll tell you, “Nothing.” That’s why they got an orange; they topped out the Christmas list. So keep asking for a pony for Christmas if you are prepared to receive a nice juicy orange for every Christmas thereafter.

Not a fruit basket or fruit cake, just a chocked full of vitamin C solitary orange. But then what do you care you’ve got a pony and an orange to ward off the sniffles during cold and flu season so you can ride your precious pony all that much more.

What do ponies and oranges have to do with camping with good friends and too much stuff? I don’t know….they’re both sweet, stinky, and hairy. What makes people drag all their stuff out of perfectly good houses with perfectly comfortable beds to sleep in a musty damp tent on a half inflated air mattress that has the sleep number comfort level of a sack of shoes?

The pure enjoyment of waving flaming balls of marshmallow around on hot pointy sticks while you’re hopped up on Hershey’s chocolate of course. Try that on a pony.