I've written about the less delicious snacks you are served as a child a few times but when I asked for VBS ideas in the Stuff Christians Like Facebook group, a number of people emailed me snack-related ideas.
I think when it comes to the little treats, or if I could use the word "vittles," there are primarily four different types:
1. Bulk
Churches don't have huge budgets to provide gourmet snacks for children that attend Vacation Bible School. So what often happens is that a member of the VBS Decorating Cartel will volunteer to go get a truckload of cookies at a discount store. In my head, I imagine the conversation going like this:
VBS Worker:
"I need about 9 million cookies. If possible, they should have as little flavor as possible, have a name like 'Vanilla-O's,' and make your mouth dry like the desert the minute you eat one. Do you have any of those?"
Store Employee:
"We do. They're called 'super funtime cookies,' they come in 'unflavored' and 'cinnamon' and you can get a box of 4,000 for $2.00."
2. Homemade
If your church is small, then the week before VBS is officially "cooking week." I think that's great. There's something cool about a church pulling together to get the snacks ready. Just stick to the simple stuff. Rice Krispie treats are a great idea for instance. This isn't a cooking competition, like the television show "Iron Chef." Don't try a new recipe or see if you can figure out a way to make an oyster ice cream. Stick to the basics. Please.
3. Messy
I can't prove this, but I secretly think some VBS teachers try to send the kids home as messy as possible. They do crafts like "make a picture with pine sap" or just give kids tubes of glue and say "go." And if the craft doesn't get them sticky enough, they often give them snacks that involve peanut butter and honey. Do you know how long it takes to get a honey and peanut butter mixture out of a kid's hair? Roughly 19 months or 19 seconds if you use the scissors and just cut the hair right off. I'm just saying, that's an option too.
4. Complicated
This one is less common, but it is probably my favorite VBS snack occurrence. My dad is a minister and during VBS week he is kind of a celebrity. Little kids see him on stage during the morning songs and think he's some sort of Christian All Star. So it's a big deal as a four-year old when he stops by your class. He told me that the only day he doesn't really stop by anymore is "Italian Ice Day." These hard frozen fruit flavored ice treats are popular in Massachusetts where I am from. One day he walked in to see some four-year olds and they had just been given blue raspberry Italian ices. They had also been given that little wooden spoon which is impossible to eat with. It's like that scene in Karate Kid where Daniel San must catch a fly with a pair of chopsticks. My dad said not a one of these kids would look at him. They were so focused on trying to excavate a bite of treat with that tiny wooden spoon that they refused to break their concentration for small talk.
I didn't mention the orange drink because I already told that "orange drink arm" story and still have nightmares from it. Mmmm VBS snacks.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
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22 comments:
Thank you for this! I'm about to go to work (at church) and the topic is going to be VBS all day... I am sure of that!
Methinks there's a market for VBS-specific cookies. They could be sold at your local Christian bookstore or at stuffchristianslike.com.
Varieties would include Crunchy Icing (church cookies are the only place you can find icing that's crunchy), Melty, Sticky, Extra-sticky, Superglue-sticky, Aged (fancy word for stale), and Extra-aged (my personal favorite for nostalgia's sake), but they only come in one flavor - cardboard. They could come in shapes of Bible characters because who doesn't love a snack that can double as a prop for a VBS story.
I think it's a gold mine.
Mmmmmm.....oyster ice cream!
Our VBS snack cartel is actually quite amazing. They tie in the snack with the bible story. For instance, for "fishers of men" day, they filled small, clear cups with blue jello and somehow suspended goldfish crackers within the blue, gooey goodness of the jello. Color me impressed.
I volunteer with snacks at VBS and my favorite day is when we wheel in the 25 pound drums of icing to decorate the Vanilla O's. The first year I licked my fingers a lot. Now, 4 years later, I would rather smell a paper mill than mass quanties of icing. VBS rocks!
Don't forget the also mandatory old lady VBS snack nazis, who make sure you only get 2 of those flavorless vanilla-os...
Man, those ladies were mean at every VBS I ever attended.
our VBS usually does the themed snacks too; one year we made the mistake of having the kids help us. It was horrible, I had icing in my hair. Anyways, you can make the most elaborate snack, but m&m rice krispies are always the crowd favorite.
Wow. The homemade option makes me wish I went to a smaller church, or just that my current church was open to homemade options. I'm sure the desserts are delicious and clearly beat out Vanilla-O's and orange drink.
That is so true about the pastor seeming like a celebrity when you're a VBS kid. I remember the pastor peeking into our classroom and my little first-child pleaser self would light up and hope with all my heart that I'd be asked some hard VBS question that I could answer brilliantly and impress Super Pastor. But he always just smiled, asked if we were having fun and moved on. Sigh.
Actually, if you want to use accurate VBS language, I believe the term is "Snack" (capital S and singular) rather than "snacks" (no capital and plural). And the phrase doesn't go "It's snack time!" but rather "It's time for Snack!"
The only thing that goes better with the unflavored cookies besides orange drink, is the off brand cheese puffs that are used at VBS, that are more chemical tasting than "cheesy". Talking about a bunch of kids that look like they just ran through the desert.
We just had snowcones EVERY day - it was the highlight of my summer as a kid! It was the reason we all wanted to go to VBS! :)
Dude, every year at VBS we were subjected to an endless river of Chex Mix. I hate Chex Mix.
According to my mom, who is on her 15th Farewell Tour of helping at VBS, the Chex Mix is still there, nauseating yet another generation of kids with it's worcestsire/salty/peanutty nastiness.
Also, apparently Testamints have become a pretty popular treat.
who decided we should have snacks at vbs???
honestly, as if they didn't have enough energy, lets give them more sugar! hooray!
or, dang we ran out of horrible goofy songs to sing, so lets just sit them down and eat so their group leaders can have at least 5 seconds of peace before your 6 year old who now has 8 gallons of orange drink in him rediscovers why he wanted to be spider man, and turns the nearest sacred church object into a jungle-gym.
(or how about a post of Stuff Christians Like: church felt banners... or, having balconies in sanctuaries.. or, being the youth minister automatically gives you a technology degree whether or not you even know how to turn on a computer, much less de-jam and manually reset the copier....
and i digress..)
Katdish,
Suggest gummy fish next time the fishers of men comes along. Goldfish taste awful after a night in jello ;)
I'm kind of late for commenting on this post, cause I'm a slacker and didn't even read this when you wrote it =]
Anywho, I thought I'd share the sickest snack ever that we had at VBS. It was kitty litter cake. If the green sprinkles randomly mixed in (cause I guess whoever made it had a cat with bowel issues) didn't freak me out enough, they just had to serve it in a litter box with a pooper scooper. It tasted pretty good though, although I'm still slightly scarred from the tootsie rolls that were everywhere.
It wasn't at VBS, but at a church social someone made something called "Moon Jello" that stands to this day as the most horrid thing other than balut that has ever been in my pie-hole, and at least with the balut I was old enough to know what to expect.
Moon Jello, or as I like to call it "Horrible Pie" is pretty simple to make. Take one packet of lime jello, mix in a container of cottage cheese, serve. I was 5 or 6 when this ghastly concoction was served, and my friend John and I still talk about it to this day. Kitty Litter Cake at least turned out to be good. Moon Jello, not so much.
Hahahahaha. Oh, VBS snacks...
We just had our VBS, and when copping some snacks in between dealing with crafts (another segment entirely, augh), my friends and I discussed this very thing, and we're firmly convinced that our church is still serving the same VBS snacks from when we went to VBS (I was the youngest of the group, and I just graduated from high school...)
And no, I don't mean the same brand. I mean the same physical snacks.
I mean, they probably did order 400,000...just the last time they had to do so was when I was five.
mmm, vanilla-o's and nutter butter knockoffs.
They served everything generic at the first day of VBS I taught at!
Red, purple, and orange drink, vanilla butter cookies, and goldfish!!!(well that's not generic but...) Good Eatin'!!
"I'm just saying, that's an option too."
Is this a Transformers reference?
-John Hall
Fresno, CA
A couple years ago I helped with a Baptist church in town's Mission VBS - for a church plant of theirs in a more ... how shall we say ... ethnic part of town. Anyway, my favorite part was that when the kids got their regular VBS snack, the leaders got home-made Vietnamese bliss. It was amazing.
As a kid, we were served frozen grapes. FROZEN. As if regular grapes weren't enough of a choking hazzard!
Looking back, I can't really find the reason for serving this. Maybe they got grapes on sale in April and, trying to save a buck, froze them until July. Dunno.
One (or five) years, we used a VBS program entitled Marketplace 29 A.D. Essentially, a biblical village was set up on the front lawn, complete with each child's personal burlap sack of gold spray-painted rocks that the tax collector would come around and collect. They took the theme a little too far, one day serving Fig Newtons and olives for snack. Fig Newtons and olives! Seriously, what child wants Fig Newtons and olives for snack?!
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