Christmas '07

The core Lorenz group
Velva, Jo, Sandra, Suzanne & Dave

The Christmas gathering was at our house this year. It was our biggest one ever - 29 of us total!! Almost everyone could make it, except for Linda, Karen & Family, Nina & Lorcan, Andrew & Adrian. It was nice to have my brother Glen & his family join us. We rented tables & chairs and set up out in the "Dave's Garage." We even rented steam chafing dishes to be able to keep the food warm, which was a good idea, because there was ..... too much food. Way too much food. If I ever do this again; I'm going to remember this and mastermind a way to "slim" it down a bit. I'm totally guilty of over-creating, as I got into a baking and cooking binge for a couple of days beforehand. So did everyone else, apparently. It just seems like cooking from scratch is the thing to do this time of year, so many of us really (over) enjoy it. The food was fabulous. Someone suggested channeling our creative energy into a charitable cause next time. Good idea. We had 9 kids, so they all got presents, and then of course the adults did the White Elephant. It was chaotic as ever, but thankfully we had Santa Clause (aka Keith) doing crowd control. We had 2 performances; our friend Ernie did his political-satire Puppet show, totally appreciated by this crowd, and Rachel and Kim did some piano/violin duets. I even heard some singing by Velva while they did "Amazing Grace." I'm pretty sure a good time was had by all, and we are lucky to have all these people in our lives.