A Christmas Lunch

I had a lovely afternoon today surrounded by my women friends. I sent the invitations a couple of weeks ago...inviting them to a Christmas lunch. There were women friends from Church and the neighbor women. What a wonderful mix we were. Young and old....and in between. It seemed that the conversation never stopped for long. We would relate one story after another about our Christmas's past. One woman is young and has children in grade school, one woman doesn't have children, several have big families and so on. It seems it didn't matter what our situation was as far as kids go...we all had stories to tell. We told how it used to be years ago and the younger ones told how it is now. Did you know that you can't take homemade treats to school for parties anymore? I told about my kids who, it seemed, always had their hands in the air to volunteer their mom to bake or be room mother. It seems that homemade cupcakes are a no-no now a days. We talked about Christmas shopping. Some traipsed through the malls and hunted for bargains, some did online shopping. A few did both. We compared bargains with each other. We talked about pets...especially dogs. The youngest person at the table said that they were debating about getting a dog for Christmas. That started the tales about all of our pets...tales about dogs being groomed and pampered with bows, a dog who rang a bell to go out, a dog who jumped on the bed and used the down comforter for a nest, a dog who entertained herself by playing with shadows... and so on. We talked about baking cookies...who does and who doesn't. The day was beautiful, so the discussion on weather didn't happen. I served a Waldorf chicken salad, cranberry jello mold, Sister Shubert's rolls, shrimp snacks, cranberry punch, coffee and tea, and warm ginger bread with lemon sauce and whipped cream. We ended the luncheon by exchanging our grab gift. I read the Night Before Christmas....putting the words right and left into the text. As I read the poem, we passed our grab gifts left and right as I told the story. It proved to be a good game. Everyone left with a new Christmas ornament. I can't end this without telling about the subject that got the loudest voices and excitement...men! We talked about men and pain. Could they go through the pain of childbirth? How do they behave when they have a cold? What is the difference between when men get sick and when women get sick? How is it that when we took care of our kids everyday and it was called being a mom...and when dad did it...it was called babysitting? This was all in fun...we love our husbands and wouldn't really want them any other way...but we women always love talking about men in general...We had so many boisterous laughs over this topic. We saved it for the end...It seemed that we were holding this topic in and could finally just let loose...

Balisha