by Beebs & Todd
We want to talk to you about something serious.
And that something is playfulness.
After Color Wars ended, we found ourselves talking about the exact same thing.
Not about who won.
Not about the competition.
Not even about the events themselves.
We kept coming back to one question:
Why does one of the most competitive days of the summer also seem to be one of the most joyful?
If you’ve never experienced Birch Trail Color Wars, that might sound surprising.
For two days, “normal” camp stops.
The entire camp, staff included, is divided into five teams.
Campers care deeply.
They want to win.
In the days leading up to Color Wars, we both had Tamarack campers stop by our offices. Some were excited. Some were nervous. They wanted to do well.
But if you walked around camp during Color Wars, the first thing you would notice wouldn’t be the competition.
You’d notice laughter.
Not polite laughter.
The kind that leaves campers doubled over trying to catch their breath.
The captains spend just as much energy trying to make everyone laugh as they do trying to win. Campers throw themselves into ridiculous skits without hesitation, belt out cheers their parents would never believe they were singing, and somehow manage to be completely committed to their own team while making the other four teams laugh just as hard.
That isn’t an accident.
One moment from this year’s Color Wars has stayed with us.
During one team’s cheer session, everything suddenly stopped.
Right in the middle of the cheering, the captains broke into a puppet show.
To anyone visiting camp for the first time, it would have made absolutely no sense.
But the older campers instantly lost it.
They were laughing so hard they could barely keep cheering.
Here’s why.
Five years ago, when those same captains were ten-year-old Middle Maples, their cabin had created that exact puppet show. It became one of those wonderfully ridiculous inside jokes that only made sense to the girls who had lived it.
Now they are fifteen.
The leaders of Color Wars.
And in one of the biggest moments of the summer, they reached back into one of their favorite camp memories and brought it back to life.
For a few minutes, they weren’t Color Wars captains anymore.
They were ten-year-old campers sitting on the cabin floor making each other laugh before lights out.
Everyone else was laughing at the puppet show.
We found ourselves smiling at something else entirely.
We were watching camp come full circle.
Watching that moment, we found ourselves asking another question.
Why did something so wonderfully ridiculous feel so meaningful?
We came to Birch Trail from very different places.
One of us grew up here.
The other spent years working as a therapist before ever setting foot at BT.
Different experiences.
Different perspectives.
Yet we’ve both arrived at the same conclusion.
What we often call the Birch Trail vibe isn’t really about cheers, costumes, or even Color Wars.
It’s a culture.
It’s the feeling that you have permission to be loud.
To wear ridiculous costumes.
To dance even if you’ve never danced before.
To laugh until your stomach hurts.
It’s a place where playfulness isn’t something to outgrow.
It’s something to join.
One of the greatest privileges of leading Birch Trail is watching that culture get passed from one generation of campers to the next.
No one teaches it.
Campers simply experience it until, one day, they become the ones passing it on.
That naturally led us to another question.
Why does this work?
Turns out, there’s real research behind it.
Play gives kids a low-stakes place to try out new strategies for handling challenges. It’s a rehearsal space for real problems, but without the real consequences. It’s where they practice reading other people, responding to them, and building the kind of resilience that later shows up as “I can handle this.” Play-based environments have been shown to build empathy, self-regulation, and emotional resilience, and it’s within play that kids first learn to take another person’s perspective and respond to it.
Silliness is a big part of that.
René Proyer, a psychologist who has spent years surveying adults on playfulness, found that playful people are able to reinterpret difficult situations so they experience them as entertaining rather than stressful. They’re also better at shifting perspective when they’re stuck on a problem, which lets them land on solutions other people wouldn’t think to try.
Researchers who study play are beginning to describe something camps have understood through experience for generations.
Play isn’t a break from learning. It’s one of the ways children learn best.
That’s exactly what we see during Color Wars.
A team has to create one cheer when everyone has a different idea.
Someone forgets the words.
Someone misses a cue.
The girls adjust.
Somehow the performance becomes even better because it isn’t perfect.
Those aren’t mistakes that get in the way of the experience. They’re part of what makes it memorable.
That puppet show lasted less than two minutes.
But underneath the laughter, something much bigger was happening.
Older campers weren’t just bringing back a funny memory.
They were showing younger campers what it looks like to lead with joy.
That’s how traditions become culture.
Children don’t become confident because someone tells them to be confident.
They become confident by doing something that feels just a little uncomfortable and discovering,
“I can do this.”
When campers feel safe enough to be playful, they’re also more willing to take the kinds of healthy risks that matter.
Trying something new.
Speaking up.
Leading.
Making a new friend.
Being themselves.
That’s the science behind the Birch Trail vibe.
It’s not one tradition.
It’s not one Color Wars cheer.
It’s hundreds of small moments that quietly tell every camper:
You belong here.
You can try.
You don’t have to be perfect.
Over time, those moments become confidence.
They become resilience.
They become lifelong friendships.
And every summer, one generation of campers passes that gift to the next.
We think that’s something pretty special.
