The Hustle and Bustle of the Christmas

A whirlwind of activities has come to a close.

On Christmas Eve we visited my cousin's home along with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins from my mother's side of the family. There are now over 50 of us, enjoying a great deal of kissing, hugging, laughing, and eating. The Christmas Eve menu has changed over the years. Back in the day the aunts put out the traditional Italian Christmas Eve spread, that included mostly fish. Baked stuffed shrimp, octopus, calamari, sausage and peppers and other delights.

These days we try to to have less food so that the preparations don't take so long, but hey we are Italian, so scaling back is hard! This year there was pizza, pesto, meatballs, shrimp cocktail, stuffed mushrooms, salad, calamari, to name a few and an assortment of desserts.

There are some cousins that I only see now on Christmas Eve, so we all count on that once a year to connect. The night goes by so fast, and it is not hardly enough time to talk to everyone, but you feel that connection when you hug hello and good-bye and give each other that extra squeeze to communicate the love that you feel towards one another.

The best part for me was that all our children were hanging out together downstairs playing Mad Gab and having a ball. All ages... from 10 to the adults.

I love that my grown up children still enjoy going to Christmas Eve, and that they appreciate our heritage and family.

Now that the family has grown so much, there are not many houses that can accommodate all those people. I could never squeeze in 50 people in my house, so I have never had the privilege of hosting. But as we look for our next home, it is a dream to buy a home with enough space to have all of my family over for Christmas Eve.

On Christmas morning, we open our gifts together as a family and have a big breakfast of home-made waffles and sausages and eggs. After admiring all of our gifts, it is time to get to work on Christmas dinner!

Christmas Day was always spent at my in-laws' home, but the past few years it has been at my house. This year she really wanted to have it at her home again so we offered to make the turkey and stuffing and bring it up to her house, so this would be one less thing she would have to do. The rest of the family would arrive early and help her with the other dinner preparations.

We had a wonderful sit down turkey dinner with all of the trimmings and topped it off with a flaming plum pudding, and the best chocolate and peanut butter truffle ever!

Today we just plan to take it easy. I have a Feldenkrais class later and other than that no plans other than hanging out here and maybe visits from some family members.