Holiday Party

Sorry, all, for the long delay in posting. Sunday December 18 was my holiday party. It turned out to be a much larger bash than expected. Seventy people showed up over the course of seven or eight hours! Whew!

The most shocking thing was that some of them arrived early. Gracias a dios, I had unexpected backup from two nice neighbor ladies--one from the CAPS triumvirate that staged the unsuccessful coup, the other is on the NHS board with me--who arrived early to see if I needed help. I did. I was up til about one in the morning making turkey chili and had cleaned the house in the morning, but hadn't made much dent in setting up the food table. So they got to work on that. Five minutes later, 45 minutes ahead of official start time, three families from Su Casa showed up. Holy cow! Latino people arriving early for a party!! We were all joking about this later.

Ms. Ribs came and she didn't have to do anything, although she was having a good time bossing me around for hostess slip-ups like having a bag of ice cubes frozen together. I took it outside and dropped in on the front steps to break it up. She came early (but not too early) and stayed until the Bears came on around 7 p.m.

My north side friends mixed in nicely with my south side friends. One of them was learning Christmas carols in Spanish from my Su Casa pals. I was really happy to see lots of interaction across age, language and culture. There were plenty of babies and little kids around, which is always a great icebreaker.

There's one particularly cute and cuddly little boy that all the guys had to sit on their laps. I told him he was the king of the uncles, el rey de los tios. He had his Tio Alejandro, Tio Kevin and Tio Jorge, among others.

We ran out of turkey chili around 6 and I had to whip up some more out of cans in a hurry. Ms. Ribs was kidding me about that and reminding me to hide the evidence.

Dawn's family came late and were the last to leave. They helped me clean up. We were all joking about El Diastro hitting my house--it was Katrina without the water. Dawn's dad found my CD of music from Michoacan and was teaching Dawn how to dance to it.

Lots of people raved afterwards about what a good time they had. Peace on earth, on the block, for a few hours anyway.