The Holidays 2005 - Part One

So when I told you guys about SK8 and Mike coming to party with the Cubans for New Year's Eve, I don't think I quite conveyed how ridiculous things could get so let me do so by recounting the happenings of the last two days:

Christmas Eve. AKA Noche Buena. My house. Oh wow. So we did the pig thing, took all day to cook the damn thing and by the end of the night not much of the 70 pound pig was still around...

Fast forward to the dancing, as some of you have seen on my away message, when I wear a pair of shoes I commit to them for the night, which is what I did, in comfy three inch stilettos. This gets better a little later. Anyway, so we have everyone dancing, including SK8 and Joel (one time for the white kids), and I'm drinking to my little heart's content which is great because it makes me forget about the pain in my feet. So at about 11:40 SK8 and I realize that we are about to miss the greatest tradition ever, so we hightail it to Hernandez' house. We arrrived just in time for the Hallelujah chorus and the placing of the Baby Jesus into the Nativity. I think her dad was more drunk this year than any other year. Glo-ri-ous!

So then I finally get to bed around 3 am, which is cool, until people bother me at 10 am. Whatever, it's Christmas, I play along. We open the presents, hang out, and then all return to bed for what would later serve us as disco naps. So my Tia is pestering us all day to get to her house and finally she says, we're all going over there RIGHT NOW if you guys don't leave. So of course, the thought of 30 people invading our house when we'd had 45 over the night before and just finished cleaning put a fire under us to move.

So now we're at Tia's house, more gift exchanging, more oohing and ahhing, fun. There's a disgusting amount of food available of course, because after all it's Christmas. And now the dancing starts. I don't know who is reading this, but I know that most of my friends from home at least have partied with my family. We dance. Salsa. Merengue. Bachata. And now and then some hip hop to give our parents heart attacks and to let my 7 year-old cousin, Adam, show off his sweet dance moves. Now here's where my stilettos from the night before become a fun fact. I have these SWEET burgundy leather boots from Nine West, they are hot. They are have four inch heels that are pencil-thin. Now, I'm tough, and I've worn these boots to school on days when I have class and meetings and I hold up fine. But I've never danced in these shoes. Hell, I don't know if I'll ever dance again! And being the stubborn girl that I am I danced for FIVE HOURS in these shoes. Add to that the fact that I'd danced the night before, add to that the fact that I was the DD so there was no alcohol to numb my pain, and finally the greatest of all the facts: Disco is back.

Well, at least it was last night, and it will be at New Year's Eve. But before you think I've lost the tough-ass chick status let us review disco. I'm not talking about the cheesy move that all of us do from Saturday Night Fever that has your arm pointing in a diagonal in sync with your hips. NO FRIENDS. My father is apparently, or was I should say, a disco king, which means lots of moving around the dance floor and lots of turns. Now, I'm an above average dancer, I have rhythm, I can move rather well, but being twirled at high speeds for five turns alternating in different directions will get most people, except the best of ballerinas, dizzy enough to fall. My ankle breaking kept flashing into my mind. It is a Christmas miracle that I did not trip and kill myself. I have the balance to dance in 4 inch stilettos people, platforms would've been no problem...I should've been born in time for disco. IT IS SO FUN! Even though about once every ten minutes I get yelled at for backleading...imagine me, trying to take control...

1:30 am rolls around. We're tired, we're fading. We leave. We try to go to Village Inn because we're STARVING, it's closed. We get home, make hot chocolate and Cuban toast. We're chatting in our dining room, answering the phone when my Tia calls telling us to come back to her house for breakfast. We decline.

So you think it ends here right? For most normal people, it would. Bedtime would come. They would sleep. They would dream. They would be resting.

We are not normal. Don't ever let me try to convince you otherwise.

Sitting in the dining room we hear them before we see them. We right off the one bang we heard as a rogue movement somewhere on the street, a car or something. And then we SEE them. All TWENTY of them. In our backyard, walking into our patio, then walking into our house. The bang we heard? One of the kids who had a wooden spoon and a pot lid. One of many kids with such a device. And the adults? Guitars, drums, and because what would a serenata be without one, una guira. (Translations: 1.Serenata: a tradition, namely found in P.R. and the D.R., where you go and sing songs to your neighbors during the holidays in the wee hours of the morning 2. Una guira: it's an instrument, I don't know if there's an English word for it, I'll investigate) So now we're in for a full on serenata, because friends of my aunts are with us, and they are a Dominican family who used to have a band, which is cool. They had been our live band for a little while at Tia's house before joining us for dancing fun, and now they were at our house. So we're singing, and in true Cuban fashion the food starts coming from I DON'T KNOW WHERE. But everyone's eating and having a great time. (Note: Frank Sinatra's My Way sounds amazing in Spanish) So finally around 3:30 am they leave. In telling this story to Colin he says, "Wow, that's crazy. That would never happen to me in Boca." He then joked about how it'd probably never happen again...

It's happened before.

Except with more people.

This is why my stories are fun. Yeah, my old church used to go on serenatas on Friday nights during the holiday season. We'd get out of youth group around 10 pm, go grab dinner, and then start knocking on congregants doors (beginning with those with teens who'd decided to stay in instead of joining us for this fun) around midnight. And this would start with about 30 people, and that group would keep growing, because once we stopped at your house, you usually came along so whoever's house was last ended up with about 40-50 people easily. Of course, part of the fun is having them show up, so we stayed in one night for it.

I don't know if many many loud mouthed Latinos have ever showed up at your doorstep at 1:00 am with panderetas, timbales, bongos, guiras, y guitarras (tambourines, snare drums, bongo drums, guiras, and guitars) but it's pretty fantastic. It's also pretty loud. I'll warn your neighbors before we come to your house, don't worry.

GUESS WHAT! The holidays are not over. There's more to come. I'm hoping that New Year's Eve will be amazing enough for the blog, that's why I entitled this entry Part One, because I'm pretty sure there will be a Part Two. Maybe a Part Three. Jackie called today to see what I was wearing to New Year's, the conversation ended with my sending her photos online. It's gonna be great!

Oh, and here's another penny for your thoughts.

My aunt says to me as they're leaving my house at 3:30 am, "You guys are lucky Village Inn was closed, because we were going to go there with all of this."

Oh wow.

P.S. It hurts to move. A lot.