Thursday, April 7, 2016

Family Fun

I saw a sign along the highway many years ago that said, “There is no such thing as fun for the whole family.” I think it was meant to be funny, but instead it provoked my thinking.  I wondered – is it true? Do entire families announce, “We are not amused”? I first had to define the terms within the premise. Without starting an argument, I think most people would agree that “the whole family” is meant to be your family-family, not your “work-family” or your “church-family.” What fun means and what qualifies as fun is a little harder to pin down.
Fun is, according to my Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, synonymous with “enjoyment, entertainment, amusement, jollification, merrymaking, recreation, diversion, leisure and relaxation; a good time, a great time.” That makes sense. However, I stumbled a bit on jollification; which, upon further research, I discovered is jolly merry making – an older term to be sure.
Fun, in other words, appears to be all over the board. It can be found in playing a board game, strolling a boardwalk, building something out of wood, eating lunch on a picnic table or sitting around a campfire. If you are entertained, you are not bored.
But, how does one entertain the whole family? Everyone has their own idea of how to jolly well make merry. An old Latin proverb states, “There is no accounting for tastes,” and that includes how people spend their leisure time. Since people have different tastes, I submit that to have fun with your family everyone in the family must be flexible, have an open-mind and a desire to try something new. Happy families enjoy spending time together, or as Leo Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 

What was enjoyable for my wife and kids twenty years ago may not have a chance today. For instance, we used to visit a place called Family Funways, a small amusement park in Burnsville, which opened in 1978. It had twenty rides – many identical to the ones found outside grocery stores in the sixties that cost just a quarter for two minutes of glee. There were also go-karts, a miniature golf course, a petting zoo, coin-operated games, and robotic characters that would come to life and perform macabre rituals for a quarter.
  
The park was usually quite empty, but we were drawn to it after an afternoon of shopping at nearby Menard’s. Even though it was free to get in and fun could be had for only a few dollars, I doubt we would find amusement there again. We will never find out, as it closed in 1999 leaving behind a vacant lot beneath some power lines. Once in a while we talk about it and wonder aloud whatever happened to it.
We also talk about some of our camping experiences and trips to Grandpa’s lake. Having fun is a shared experience, whether it is found in hobbies, sports, games or just enjoying time together. We found there is such as a thing as fun for the whole family and we have great memories to prove it.





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