Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

Irene and Ciro invited us to have dinner with them on Christmas Eve. We arrived at 7 PM as requested and we treated to a wonderful dinner. Roasted pork with a wonderful sauce, mashed potatoes, pasta salad, fresh breads and a fantastic tasting pineapple cheesecake for desert. Irene said that this is a traditional meal for them. It was delicious! We visited and then Irenes brother came over also, then the oldest son, his wife and their son returned from dinner with her mother. Allan (the little boy) was of course very excited, they had had a pinata at the other grandmas house and he was hyped!! He was allowed to open a couple of gifts and the excitement continued. We looked at some more photos on their computer that I had taken of their Christmas decorations and then showed Irene some photos of our home, yard, etc.. She was amazed at the yard size. They were saying that they would like to take us to a ranch about 45 minutes away, apparently it is an Apache indian site. Sounds interesting. We made our farewells and were called back to be given the rest of the cake to take home with us.

Christmas day dawned warm and sunny. I got the food ready to cook for our Christmas dinner, wrote a Thank you note to Ciro and Irene for the lovely dinner and we were ready for the day. We hopped a bus and went back to our hidden cove. It was a tough way to spend Christmas afternoon, sitting on the beach, watching the fish jumping in the water, looking at all the sea urchins, etc. in the tidal pools. I walked along the edge of the shore, paddling in the water, it is cool right now; but still warmer than our lakes are in the summer. There were people swimming the other day at a different beach we were at, but I will stick to my paddling. A wonderful peaceful time, all the time we were there we saw only 5 other people.

Returned home, stuck our chicken in the oven to roast and relaxed. A knock on the door and it is Irene with some more food from last nights dinner, maybe she thinks Roy needs feeding up.

Monday morning and all is back to normal, laundry done, windows washed, etc. no need to worry about dinner tonight as we have lots of leftovers in the fridge.

Lovely warm, sunny day.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve--what a different day than other Christmas Eves! It is sunny and warm with no breeze to speak of. No cold wind, cold temperatures, snow or any of the other things that make life difficult.

The last few days the neighborhood children have been busy with their firecrackers. They seem to like setting them off at the strangest times of the day. Someone set some off at 5 AM this morning, oh well, hopefully they enjoyed it.

Yesterday I baked some cookies and took some over to Ciro and Irene, she is always bringing something over to us. My baking vocabulary is not the greatest so we had a few laughs as I tried to explain to her what type they were. A couple of hours later, Ciro is at the door with a huge bag of lemons, oranges, mandarin oranges and grapefruit (Roy had just bought a kilo of mandarins, so we are up to our necks in oranges! He also had a foot high cut-out of 2 snow men, or I should say 1 snowman and 1 snow woman, he laughingly told us that it was meant to be Roy and myself! We hung it up on our door as we didn't do any Christmas decorating. It seems so strange to see them making their decorations out of sheets of styrofoam and then painting them and hanging it all outside. That would last about 5 minutes at home before the wind totally destroyed it.

With all the oranges around I made orange flavored french toast for breakfast and garnished the plates with-----you got it, orange slices. It was good; but I don't think we will need lunch today.

Wishing everyone a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!