Love Those Wildwood Days !

I've written before about the Wildwoods, New Jersey. But it's summer time, and you can never get enough of that Jersey shore town once the bug has bitten you.

The bride and I drove on down last week and stayed overnight at one of our favorite Wildwood Crest beachfront motels, the Olympic Island Beach Resort, and it was a fantastic little getaway as always.

Spent the first afternoon down on the beach for hours, and I can report that the water is really starting to warm up. For me, the ocean water temperature has to be around 70 degrees at a minimum to really enjoy it, and we were actually surprised that it was that warm already.

Often up in the northeast section of the country, the air temps can be hot and muggy, but the water temps remain a bit cool well into July. Not anymore, so be ready for wading into the waves if you head down now.

We soaked up a very sunny and warm afternoon just hanging on the beach, taking advantage of the umbrella rental joint. The young guy who popped in our umbrella was down for the season, staying with a bunch of friends from his Delaware County neighborhood. Ah, to be young and have nothing to do but work and hang down the shore all summer!

Sunday or Sabbath?

A couple of years back, I tried to make each Sunday a chance to post on some topic of Faith, and with this posting I will be going back to that effort.

It's appropriate to start here on a summer Sunday with a two-part theme: 1) When should you go to Church in the first place?, and 2) Why do many drift away as summer comes?

Let's start with an effort to answer that first question. These days, many churches celebrate their weekly obligation services of the Mass on Saturday evening, then have a full compliment of Sunday morning services, and some even offer a Sunday evening service.

There are some religious organizations, including Seventh-Day Adventists, who claim that Christians must worship on Saturdays, not on Sundays, because Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath, and they believe that at some point through the years the Church arbitrarily changed things to Sundays.

The fact is that Sundays were the day of worship for Christian believers as far back as New Testament times. Many passages of scripture indicate this practice as more desirable, worshiping on 'The Lord's Day', as Sunday was known to them.

As just one of many examples, St. Ignatius of Antioch describes in a letter to the Magnesians written in 110 A.D. as follows:

The Pamplona Encierro

It's that time of year again, time for the famous 'Running of the Bulls' through the streets of Pamplona, Spain. 

This is the highest profile event of an annual 9-day festival of 'San Fermin', which begins each year at noon on July 6th and runs through midnight on July 14th. 

Saint Fermin is a Catholic saint who is the patron saint of the city of Pamplona. He was said to have been martyred by having his body drug through the streets by bulls. 

The current festival has it's roots in a secular festival previously held in June, and later moved to September, known as the Sanfermines. 

The bull runs began in the area as far back as the 13th century. Cattle merchants would come to town for commercial festivals to celebrate the beginning of summer, and bullfights became central to the celebrations. 

The runs custom traces it's origins back to the process of transporting bulls from their off-site corrals to the bullring for those bullfights. During this process, youngsters would jump in among the bulls as they were being moved in order to show their bravery. The celebration was finally formally established to the month of July in 1592. 

Oh, Those Wildwood Days!

There is peaceful serenity in the clear blue skies and the fast-rising sun, in the swooping and squawking of the seagulls, in the clatter of bicycle tires along the boardwalk on a typical laid-back summer morning in the Wildwoods.

There is excited chaos in the colorful lights of the amusements, in the smells of the incredible variety of foods, in the dull roar of thousands of conversations taking place among the throngs along the boardwalk on a typical free-wheeling summer night in the Wildwoods.

For my family and me, and for countless others for nearly a century now, summer means “Wildwood Days”, a trip “down the shore”, where every day’s a holiday, and every night is a Saturday night.

The place is known by many names: Wildwood, the Wildwoods, Wildwood-By-The-Sea. There are the old names: Anglesea, Holly Beach, Wildwood Crest.

Today we have the three boroughs that include Wildwood, North Wildwood and the Crest. But whatever name it goes by to you and yours, the place is known by all of us as the epitome of the family summer sun and fun vacation spot.

As a boy, my family had a place on Magnolia Avenue, just about a half-block off the boardwalk, not far from the famous Groff’s Restaurant. It seemed that every night the line would form outside Groff’s for the dinner crowd, stretching all the way down Magnolia away from the boards. We had a small place, usually crowded with parents and kids, aunts and uncles and cousins, and many friends.

After a few years, a few of the aunts and uncles organized and bought a place farther away from the madness, on Leaming Avenue at the far southern end of Wildwood, about 2-3 blocks from the Crest and about five blocks from the boardwalk. It was much farther away from the action, but it was still down the shore, and the new house was bigger with a number of bedrooms and a nice sized backyard.

For most of the 1970’s and even into the 1980’s, this was the Wildwood of my youth. A family shore house filled with uncles rising early to go crabbing and then coming home and playing pinochle on the front porch, aunts cooking up those crabs and many other meals while keeping the conversations flowing on family news, and us cousins running around the house, the streets and the boards.