Happy New Year! 2007

It's late. Definitely past midnight! But the wish is sincere. I hope you had a good celebration and are looking forward to a good year.

My evening celebration was a pleasant surprise. When I got the invitation I wasn't sure who I'd see and didn't really know the lady who gave it well. Still I said, "Yes." because she was really nice and managed to make me, a stranger, feel wanted.

What I expected was an evening of needing to follow conversations among people I didn't know well or at all. Instead I arrived and found the house filled with ladies I knew from church and everyone had brought something. It was a total hen gathering. The food was good. So was the conversation which instead of being busy and designed to impress was friendly, sharing and sometimes contemplative. We covered everything from politics to paper dolls. There was a book of the later, for our hostess is a grandmother. One of us came up with the name of the magazine I used to cut them from every month when my grandmother bought it - McCall's.

Did I mention that the food was good? Leave it to women who help hold church gatherings to know how to cook well. I came home with a recipe for a blackeyed pea salad which I will share with my mom. We even had eggnog made from scratch! After dinner was eaten the pets were let into the gathering and we got to cuddle up to two dogs. None of us objected to the animal invasion. Instead we felt like part of the family and thought it appropriate that the pets were there too.

Midnight wasn't noisy with tooting because we were so into our conversation that we missed the turn of the clock. When we did notice, our hostess brought out the party blowers that everyone has tooted since I was a kid and we all had a toast to celebrate the new year.

Then I drove safely home having had nothing alcoholic to drink but having the name of a new drink to look up. One of the ladies talked fondly about something called a Velvet Hammer which is said to contain, brandy, chocolate liqueur, and ice cream topped with nutmeg. Sounds yummy!

At this point it is past 2:00 AM and I have way too much caffeine in my system to go to sleep. Still I am going to take myself to bed and try to finish the book I started this week called Storm Front by Jim Butcher. So Happy New Year all! And to all a Good Night!