What Young Men Do For Fun

James works with the 16-18 year-old boys from church and helps them plan and put on activities to help fulfill scouting requirements, learn gospel studies, and generally enjoy being young and physically able. They’ve done all sorts of things recently – several campouts, fencing, an etiquette dinner, crime scene investigation, origami, mission prep, and all sorts of others events.

This month, they had a Lord of the Rings movie marathon. It started at 4pm on a Friday evening and went until about 3:30am Saturday morning. Who planned this? I have to assume James did since he enjoys LOTR so much but he enjoys his sleep just a bit more so I’m slightly amazed. And you can’t have 10 young men for 12 hours straight without buying a couple grocery stores and a Costco out of business. So, here was our freezer prior to the event…

And the chocolate…

He bought (or had donated) 3 bags of hot wings, two huge pizzas and breadsticks from Papa Murphy’s, a tray of sub sandwiches, about 10 pounds of chocolate and other candy, three bags of chips and dip, 8 bags of un-popped popcorn, a 5-quart bucket of ice cream and only 4 2-liters of soda. I had to bring 5 or 6 more 2-liters about a third of the way through the night.

Here’s the event… I only stayed until 10pm. A seminary teacher cannot pull all-nighters. They just can't.

Here’s what was left…



Sadly, there’s not much difference between the before and after pictures. I think the amount of food needed was highly miscalculated, but maybe that’s just all part of a teenage-boys’ activity – feeling surrounded by food and action-packed movies. What do I know?