Tradition, Tradition!

My Cousins!

From left to right. Front row: Matt, Christian. Back row: Andy, Me, Josh, Katie

Traditions in my family are never normal ones, because my family is never what one might say.. normal. We have quite a few of them that we do every year. Here's some so you can get to know my family and our quirks a little better.

Most of them happen at the end of the year towards the holidays but we do have one that resides over the 4th of July weekend. We have property in Long Beach, WA with a few trailers on it so every year we go up there and spend about a week soaking up the sun and enjoying spending time with each other (most of the time). In Long Beach there is always a 4th of July festival that we attend as well as a parade, which my mother usually inserts herself in one way or another... when that happens we pretend we don't know her, but inside we love her dearly! While at the festival we get elephants ears made by the best elephant ear place ever! After we have spent the day there we go and buy fireworks (the really big ones since those are legal in WA, but not in OR!) and take our cars down onto the beach for the remainder of the day, pick a good spot and set up camp. We usually bring a tent thing and play some card games and stuff while waiting for it to get dark, as well as digging a hole for a bonfire! Once it gets dark we start letting the fireworks loose (we always get the panda bear, the chinese pagota, and the bees which flew up my dad's pants one time, even though they are kinda lame... we still have too!) After all ours are gone it is usually time for the "Fireworks Show Spectacular" put on by the city of Long Beach, so we sit on top of the cars and watch the amazingness happen!

The next traditions happen around Thanksgiving and Christmas. We have our Thanksgiving dinner every year at my Aunt Debbie's house in Oregon City (Home of the end of the Oregon Trail!) And it wouldn't be a Thanksgiving dinner for us without "brown 'n serve" rolls, pistachio pudding, and a giant bowl of olives! After we eat we spend hours and hours playing "Apples to Apples," "Taboo", and a dice game called 10,000. After we are done we say our goodbyes... until the next day.

The day after Thanksgiving we always get together to go through the Christmas lights at the P.I.R. (Portland International Raceway). There they decorate the race track with tons and tons of Christmas lights and you get to drive through it at night and look at them all. In short it is a Christmas light winter wonderland! But before we can do that we have to go out to dinner at a resturant which we have no idea what the name of it is, but we just call it "The Cheesy Mexican Place." Inside there is a manequin missing a few fingers and with hair looking a little sparce, but she's our favorite and we look forward to seeing her every year. We named her Rosarita. As well they have some blow up beer bottles hanging from the ceiling along with other random as ever decorations. That's why we call it "cheesy." They do have a really cool giant fish tank which used to have a puffer fish in it and we couldn't wait to see him every year but 2 years ago we were informed that he was taken to the hospital for an illness and didn't make it. That was a sad day in our family. The food there, let me be the first to say is not very good and nobody in the family likes going there because the food makes us sick, but tradition is tradition and we have to go anyways! The employees at "The Cheesy" expect us to come every year!

There's a couple family traditions for ya! I hope my family isn't to strange for you!