Happy St. Nicholas Day!

What a great day we had! We had got everything done the night before that we needed to and when the sun came up we were ready to have a party!

The party that we had was for St.Nicholas Day and also my Mom’s Christmas party. We don’t normally have both of these together, but this year we decided it was a good time that everyone should be able to make it. So first things first. We started out the morning with a special guest. Now in our family a special guest this time of the year can only mean one guy – you guessed it, St. Nicholas himself! We’ve been celebrating this tradition in our family sine 1927 and I sure hope we can continue it for many years to come because it’s is a whole lot of fun. Now some of the kids today were not scared of him

and well some of the others were. And honestly that’s OK. Our family is big and kinda overwhelming and then throw in St Nicholas.. whew!!

But with all the kids around the action happening, you seriously couldn’t help smile when you looked at this group. All 60+ of us! After St. Nicholas heard what all the kids wanted for Christmas, Mom handed out some of her gifts to the younger kids. Again, this was the first time that we’ve done this and I think it turned out pretty good. You know me, I like traditions but this time it’s OK to mix it up a little bit. Then out comes the food! There was food coming from all over the place. Some from the refrigerators in the Roadhouse, some from coolers, others were coming from the house kitchen, and some still being brought in from the cars. Yea, you seriously can not have too much food at a time like this can you? After a quick prayer, we dug in. Even though it seemed like a lot of food at the beginning, at the end of the night we seemed to have polished almost all of it off. But in our defense we started dinner around 12:00 and left the Roadhouse that night around 7:30. So with the kids playing games the ‘older’ kids were getting ready for the annual Christmas exchange. Having what we call a White Elephant exchange is one tradition that don’t want to miss and this game literally lasted a couple of hours. I’m sure some families are nice about not stealing each other’s gifts, but that’s not how we play it. We play with strategy and a whole heck of a lot of laughs! At the end of the night we all headed downtown to celebrate my brother’s birthday party at a local establishment. It was a perfect way to end the perfect day!