^^ Getting off the ground is a great advice. I typically take several thinner blankets, as I do not have space age materials haha. My girlfriend has these really cool foam mat things that unroll, and kinda inflate (the foam just kinda unflatens). I have also seen smaller, cheap air matrices. I never used them personally, but I'm sure they would be great.
For fire starting, my one friend is all hyped up about using his home-made cotton balls covered in vasoline this year! haha. We actually lit one just to see how it did, and it actually burned very well, and for a good 5 minutes! So, package a few of them in a small zip lock bag, and you should be set! And as mentioned, prepare first, then light. Start with real thin, dry twigs, and stack them up rather densely. Enjoy!
X2, you're probably talking about Therma-Rest mattresses. They don't do that much for me as far as padding is concerned (I'm kinda bony) but they do keep the cold away.
Best thing for cold - bring heavy blankets to put over your sleeping bag. I have a single summer sleeping bag, don't have the money for a winter bag yet. Went camping last fall and it was 25 degrees in the tent when we woke up, I was perfectly comfortable till I got out of my sleeping bag...
As for fire stuff - check your local DPW, a lot of the time they'll have a big huge pile of trees that came down over the last winter, ask someone and they'll probably let you take a whole bunch free. Saw/split it up and you've got firewood... kindling, I like the very dry old dead pine branches that fall off the taller trees. In fact, if you can get enough of those, you can get a hot enough fire going to smelt aluminum, that was a project me and my brother did while camping in high school.
When setting up a tarp, don't just tie the corners to the tallest branch you can reach - you'll be making a great swimming pool right over your head. A proper tarp setup takes a bit of work, but is well worth it... you'll need at least six to eight pulleys and probably a couple hundred feet of rope, as well as a large (comfortable throwing weight) fishing line sinker and ~50 feet of much thinner, lighter rope. I won't get into details on how to get the ropes into the trees (it's better done with pictures), but you want a ridgeline between two trees directly across the campsite from each other (tie this line to the proper grommets on your tarp before you put the line up), along with a line from each corner to another tree and perhaps lines from each of the low sides of the tarp to the ground / a low tree. I've weathered torrential downpours that had almost everyone in the campground leaving using a setup like this - we were playing Monopoly and cooking dinner as everyone else packed up their gear and left.
Hopefully I'll have time to draw some diagrams on putting the ropes for a tarp up later tonight, just got a new camera so I should be able to actually post them easily instead of trying to MSPaint things.
EDIT: another thing to consider is hammocks. If you have a screwed up back like I do, regular sleeping arrangements may not work, for some reason I'm really comfortable in a hammock but feel like I ended up in a cage match if I sleep flat on my back on the ground. If you mostly keep the camping to the summer, keeping cool enough will be more of a concern than keeping warm enough. Some of the best camping I ever did was an 80 mile canoe trip on the Allagash in high school, we didn't even bring tents, just small tarps, sleeping bags, hammocks, rope, and mosquito nets. I quickly discovered that mosquito nets that fall on your face are useless, but that if you get in your sleeping bag headfirst and leave your boots on, you'll be fine...
That reminds me. BRING BUG SPRAY!