Mekerah P., Age 16
Every year at Camp Gilgal various ice breakers are played on the first night once all the campers and various staff have arrived. This year, there were three – The Human Knot, “Honey, If You Love Me” and, of course, Steal the Kosher Bacon.
These three games have various rules. In The Human Knot, you play by forming a circle with campers and staff alike, joining hands with two different people and then attempting to un-knot yourselves – basically, you twist and turn until your group has formed a rough circle once again. And, all this, without releasing each other’s hands!
This year, there were several different results of the game. 
One group managed to get untangled twice! Two cabins didn’t get untangled at all and one group achieved it once. Sadly, I was a camper among one of the two groups that were never able to get completely untangled.
For the game “Honey, If You Love Me,” the rule is simple – don’t smile. How the game is played is that everyone gathers into a circle, except for one person. That single person goes around the circle until they pick a victim and say in varying degrees of strangeness (one staff member did a handstand!), “Honey, if you love me, won’t you please, please smile?” The chosen person must then – without laughing or smiling (if they haven’t already) – respond with “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile.”
The last game played was Steal the Kosher Bacon. For this game, we all went onto the one big grassy field and were sorted into three teams. Three objects (the kosher bacon) were placed in the center – a roll of tape, a tennis ball and some unfortunate person’s shoe. Every person was numbered when placed into their teams and either Streetlight or Snapple would call out random numbers. The people with those numbers would then sprint into the center in an attempt to obtain one of the three objects – if not more. All in all, it was a pretty eventful first day of camp.
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