New Year's Celebration

This year I was blessed to be able to spend New Year’s Eve with one of my favorite families in my community.  My host family was all away visiting other family so I was unable to celebrate with them this year, but I had a wonderful time none the less.  The big celebration here is very similar to the celebrations at Christmas Eve where we all just sat around all evening waiting for midnight to come around when the festivities really begin.  The picture below is the family welcoming in the New Year right at midnight complete with songs and a guitar! 

The New Year’s meals complete with the typical pork, beef, mandioca, chipa guazu, and even a pig head!

They were very proud of the pig head and wanted a photo with it.  Since this is a very large family at big family get-togethers they don’t have enough plates and utensils for everyone plus who wants to wash the dishes afterward so instead there is some communal knifes and you just go for it.  They did give me a plate though and a chair even, so I guess I was a fancy guest for this wonderful and fun dinner!

Three generations of women eating dinner complete with the cleanly eaten pig jaw on top of her head with the mom and grandmother with bones and knives.  A very fun family and new eating styles that actually make a lot of sense!

This picture is a little bit out of order but this is the sunset from behind my house, or the last sunset of 2014.  What a great way to end a year full of such great adventures!

So on New Year ’s Day I once again celebrated with the same family and they had even more family come in from Caaguazu so we just had a huge celebration.  This family has 12 kids in total with so many grandchildren and such it’s hard to keep track of.  For this celebration we only had 6 of the 12 kids there but we had a very full house but luckily plenty of food!  This is a picture of us making the sopa Paraguaya (the wonderfully healthy food I had a blog post of awhile back) in one of the wash bins because we didn’t have any bowl that was big enough.  

Just a photo of me sitting out under the mango tree waiting for the outdoor oven to get hot enough to but the sopa in.  

The freshly baked sopa coming out of the oven, yummy!

Some of the little girls hanging out and playing in the dirt making dirt pies which kept them busy most of the morning and afternoon while we were preparing lunch.  I am just amazed here at the limited number of actual “toys” but how kids can just entertain themselves with just such simple things and seem so much happier and have such wonderful imaginations.  

The family dinner with once again eating with your hands and trying to eat fast enough to get food before it is all gone.  I brought a cucumber/onion salad with vinegar to the lunch and was wonderfully surprised when they ate it all. A lot of people don’t know what a cucumber is and/or how to eat one, so I brought them fresh from my garden and made it up there.  They said it was a great balance with all of the grilled meat and other “fatty foods”, good to know I guess!  

The rest of the afternoon we spent out underneath the shade tree listening to music and just hanging out.  It was a very hot afternoon so it was nice to just sit and relax after such wonderful celebrations! You can also see the carrot cake I made which was a huge hit with everyone and was quickly eaten.  

I just wanted to end this blog post with a nice quote I found.  I hope you all have a Happy New Year and here’s to 2015 and whatever things may lie ahead!

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something.

-Neil Gaiman