Holiday highlights part 1

Sun the 23rd we loaded up the car with our luggage, gifts, food, and dogs and got on the road by 8:30, right on schedule.  After unloading everything at Spouse's sister's house, our 2 nephews joined us as we met up with our friends for our annual hippie roll and pizza luncheon.  We had a wonderful lunch with Lisa, Carl, Kerry & Hugh, Kelly, Alex, and Kim & Danny and I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes more than once.  As is our custom, we took a group photo:

One of the things that had me laughing so hard were the 'mini hands'.  Or as I called them, 'Trump hands'.  Kim brought these little plastic hands that fit on the end of your finger, which were simultaneously hilarious and creepy.  We kept finding different ways to position them for comedic effect.

I've lost count of how many years we've been doing this, but its certainly a highlight of the Christmas season for me.  And the owners of the restaurant couldn't be nicer to our wacky group.

Afterward we hung out at the house with the family for a couple hours, then met up with our old friends Ron & James and Mike & Clark at our favorite Mexican restaurant Cantina Mexicana, also known as The Taco House.  Unfortunately I neglected to take any photos of our gathering. We've known them for over 20 years and we're all very happy we've maintained our friendship despite Spouse & me moving away 12 years ago.  The 4 of them have visited us many times at home, and we were happy we all had an opportunity to meet up for dinner.  We were also overjoyed to see the Taco House owners Juan & Gloria too!  As we were looking at the margarita menu we noticed a small typo.  One of the choices was a "Caddillac" margarita. We speculated about what it was made of. Someone suggested it was made with top shelf tequila, so I joked that the top shelf liquor made it special and was responsible for the extra "d" in "Caddilac".  Then I said "Who doesn't like some extra D???" and we all had a good laugh!