Christmas Day 2006

The day of the tamales. Hundreds of tamales.

Okay here is what happened, the ladies ask if we were having anything special on Christmas,

well our budget has no room for anything extra but we could see what we could do. Jen got on

the phone to her grandmother and talked with her and found out that her ladies group wanted to pay for the dinner. A special thank you to all who helped.

Well tamales are the traditional Christmas dinner here so the ladies made tamales on Friday night until nine o'clock. We gave them the day off on Monday to be with their families. We baked on Sunday night two hundred cupcakes. So there is the menu. Tamales and cupcakes. The tamales were stuffed with rice, chicken, raisins, olives, cornmeal and some other stuff and then wrapped in a banana leaf to cook. The cupcakes, not so hard.

Well Christmas morning comes, Alora, Katrina, Randy, Brandy and myself all head to Mololoa. We start warming up the tamales and frosting the cupcakes. Brandy was in charge of the gummy bears but needed a little guidance. She couldn't get the fact that I like having one of each color not all of the same color of bears on each cupcake. I tell you good help is hard to find (love you Brandy). The day started slow, most people stay up extremely late on the 24th and sleep half the day away. The children enjoyed the special treats. The afternoon picked up and by the time the day was over we were really pooped but we still had food. So we loaded up the back of the truck and set out to make a few special deliveries. We found hungry children on the streets. We would give them a cupcake or tamale and their little face lit up like a Christmas tree. We stopped at dumpster and gave food to people digging in the trash, we felt somewhat like Santa Clause just making random stops through out the city. By the time it was over we were done for. We came home showered and I had a bowl of cereal for Christmas dinner. I tell you what it was the best Christmas dinner I think I have ever had.