Holiday Fun!!!!!

Wahoooooooo!!! I have partied my buns off the last two days and I believe this has been one of the absolute best holidays I've had in a long time. We started it off by having Mike and Freckles over for dinner. I cooked a really wonderful meal of bar-b-que shrimp, chicken drummies, macaroni salad, pea salad and for dessert cranberry salad with whipped cream. We stuffed ourselves. We also sat on our porch with the lights and the luminaries creating a beautiful glow for us.

After our dinner, Christmas Eve night, we went down to Terry's, shown here with Coley. Lily,above, with me, Coley, Freckles and Mike. In Costa Rica the custom is to open your presents on Christmas Eve, so we took all of Lily's gifts to her and surprised her with clothes, jewelry, nail polish, candy, hair ribbons, body wash, and a number of other small items. She loved it and was so totally amazed with all her new stuff. It was great fun for us as well watching her open all the gifts.

Here's our beautiful luminaries and you can see our lights on our porch. Pretty huh!!!!!

I had a great time in my new tie dyed dress. Coley got it for me for Christmas and the whole night I kept noticing how red my hands were getting. It seems a though the "made in India" dress was rubbing off on me. We had a marvelous laugh all evening about how "sunburned" I was looking. I'll never forget this dress and all the fun I had wearing it!!

So, here we are Christmas day, headed to the Palo Verde for a trip up the river to view wildlife. We stopped in Ortega, walked through the local park and saw a number of iguanas, such as this guy. We learned that the male turns orange when he is ready to mate and we saw a number of iguanas in various states from really bright orange to green and some almost black.

Coley and Bob, a friend who went with us on the Palo Verde trip.

As you look as this tree trunk, you'll see what looks like scales. Those are actually long-nosed bats that appeared to be really small creatures, but when they took to the air they were actually the same size as most bats you see in North America. Had the tour guide not pointed them out, we would never have seen them.

Crocodile.

White-faced spider monkeys that crawled right on board with us. Our guide had a banana and he proceeded to cut it up into small pieces and put it on our heads or shoulders so the monkeys actually crawled up onto us.

Mike and the monkey.

Freckles with the monkey.

Another iguana, but can you see that his tail is half gone. They actually lose them in fights and then grow them back. However, the guide told us that they are striped naturally, except if they lose it, then it grows back as a solid color.

So we had a great two days of celebrating the holidays. We have laughed until we cried, toasted the season, shared gifts together but most of all, shared love.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!