New Year's Eve

December 31st, 2008. Is 9:00 p.m. and we just start with our family show. As always the three little girls dance the same songs and they don’t even dance; they just move a little, sing the same song they love singing every weekend after lunch, and tell jokes; jokes that we are used to laugh about even if they are not funny, because, well, they look so funny making faces when they try to tell all those big words they use and they can’t even tell them right. Now grandpas’ song, they always sing romantic songs, then our great-grandmother takes the microphone and she tells us some jokes, sometimes inappropriate jokes and those are the funniest because we try to get them and we always get them backwards. After they show they have is our time, the 5 big cousins’ time, each year we have something different. I remember once we had our rock band and it was really cool because we didn’t have real instruments just a guitar so we create our instruments with bottles and boxes, also we once make a movie and we present it and we actually didn’t finish it but it was cool. These time I sing with my older cousin and my brother play the guitar with my other cousin, then we sang “We are the world” from Michael Jackson with my little cousin and we ended with some jokes.  Something wouldn’t change ever was “Primer Infarto”, the news presentation with my mom and her two sisters, they dressed pretty elegant with black pants, white blouse and black jacket and they had the same heels so they wear them. Primer Infarto was about embarrassing news, facts, or even secrets about each family member and it was REALLY embarrassing sometimes like when they talk about my aunt having a boyfriend and her dad didn’t knew anything about it and well they just say it like such a careless thing and it became a huge problem and it was funny because later on my great grandmother tell stories about my grandma’s life that were kind of alike with what they were talking about and she get kind of upset about it but then she realized how funny it was that almost the same stories were repeated generation by generation. We finished the entire show at 11:45 more a less so we get all the fireworks our grandpa had bought for us and then it was 12:00 a.m. so each one of us eat 12 grapes and we hug each other, later we came into the house to pray and then we keep on eating a little bit, and we play some music so we dance and sing and we were all together. This was our last New Year’s eve together, and of course we didn’t knew it, a year later one of our great grandmothers die and that year also 3 of my cousins went to Atlanta, Georgia and celebrate New Year over there. Is really sad to remember about all those things we used to do as a family for about 13 years. Hopefully some day we would have another New Year eve like these, and I wish when we have kids we can have something like these with our families,  because I think for my cousins and me these thing would be always in our minds and are things we’ll never forget about because we really enjoyed preparing each of our acts. We used to spend almost 5 months preparing our shows and thinking how we could make every year special and different. Even when grandpa told us he wasn’t sure we would have this great New Year eve as usually because our great grandmother was at the hospital we thought about thing we could present at the hospital. And I think these is one of my favorite personal rituals I have, because I really enjoy it and it started like just a little game one night and it became a really important thing to us.