Jenny was extremely excited. The snow was melting, and the ice was thinning. It was that time of the year, when her dad took the kids to collect the sweet maple syrup from the maple tree. But this time it was more special. She was now seven and old enough to join them on this trip. She had always dreamt of tasting the sweet maple syrup flowing directly from the trees!

So along with her siblings and her dad, Jenny set off to a journey to the maple sugar woods. They carried the wooden buckets on the horse cart. When they reached the forest, they set up their camps and started drilling holes in the maple trees. After pushing wooden spouts into the tree trunks, they placed the wooden buckets underneath the spouts.

Jenny was too excited to wait for the bucket to fill, so she touched the sap and tasted it. To her surprise it did not taste anything like the maple syrup at all. In fact,  it was not even sweet. She ran to her dad and complained that they had come to the wrong woods. Her father smiled and said that the sap has to be boiled a lot before it tastes like the maple syrup.

It was beginning to get dark, and people huddled together in their tents. The whole night maple sap dripped into the wooden buckets. Jenny spent the whole night dreaming of warm delicious maple syrup with hot pancakes. Next morning when she woke up there was an large fire burning with a enormous iron port on top of it. Her dad made her sit on his shoulders so she could smell the maple syrup as the sap was boiling down.

Dad knew how long to let it boil for.  He let it boil for almost the whole day. When the syrup was ready they made candies out of it by throwing some in the snow.  After having their full of maple syrup, they packed all the syrup and started back home.

It was the best camping party ever for Jenny.

This story is set in olden times, but nowadays people use powerful machines to collect the sap and turn it into maple syrup.

History of maple syrup

Maple syrup was first collected and used by the indigenous peoples of North America. The practice was adopted by European settlers, who gradually improved production methods. Technological improvements in the 1970s further refined syrup processing.