2010: The Year of the TIGER!

This past Saturday was New Year's Eve... Lunar New Year, that is. To celebrate, we took a trip down to Houston to visit the family and have a good old fashioned Tet party. Doesn't Mia look like a little china doll???

If you're unfamiliar with the way Tet works, you have to know that the Asian culture is big until "Luck", primarily good luck. When family and friends get together for new year's (Tet in Vietnamses), the young wish their elder a new year filled with happiness, good health, success, etc. The elders, in turn, wish the children happy new year and give them red envelops (red being the lucky color) filled with cash. The cash is meant to symbolize the wealth that they will have the rest of the year. The money is called Li Xi. Or as Mark calls it, Lychee

Here is a picture of Mia's cousin Tracy Li Xi'ing her. Note the stash in Mommy's back pocket

Like I said, a very family oriented holiday. Here I am with 2 of my cousins (Jennifer on the left and Terri on the right) with our kids Meagan, Jonathan and Mia.

Mom also likes to put together a Li Xi tree that everyone gets to pick from. You could get $1, you could get $20! What's your luck going to be like?? Tommy & Steph trying to get it right:

The final tradition is a gambling dice game. You take your change and place it on one of six pictures (shrimp, crab, fish, deer, gourd or rooster. don't ask me how they come up with that combination). The house shakes 3 dice and pay out accordingly. Here's all of us hovered around as Meagan plays dealer in her Cinderella dress:

But that wasn't all! We also had a belated birthday celebration for Theresa & Meagan. We got Meagan the Cinderella dress and tiara for her b-day and she was so excited to put it on. Theresa wanted in on the game so Mom found her a pretty tiara as well. Aren't they darling??

New Year's Eve 2008

What an interesting day/evening this was. Around 4pm, Mark and I headed out to what turned out to be a fairly long trip to find fireworks. We weren't so much looking to light the skies ablaze that night. But rather, we were looking for the few perfect sparklers for the groom's cake =)

After driving over to Scarsdale, then across town on the Beltway, we finally made contact. Cars were parked miles away. We made our purchase (a measley $5-$10) and we were off. Stoli thought it was a pretty crappy trip since he never even got out of the car.

Then we rushed home to shower and get ready for dinner. We were met with 4 others trying to do the same... Tommy & Cathy, et al. Except they were due to leave the house about an hour before us. So we yielded. We started with dinner on the Kemah Boardwalk with my parents. Although good, it wasn't anything spectacular. We've had better meals on the boardwalk.

After dinner, it was probably close to 10PM so we headed over to Bakkhus. There, Beth greeted us with party hats, beads and noise makers. What a great planner! Also present were Beth's family from Mississippi. Apparently, my family had already met them in FL when Adam graduated from OTS. So everyone made their rounds, "hello, good to see you again, how are you, etc, etc." No one seemed to remember that Mark and I had not been able to make it out there and so we didn't know anyone. No matter, within minutes people were hugging me like I was a long lost friend. I immediately realized what was going on. They were all confusing me for Cathy. This happened ALL night long. With only a few people willing to admit that they had made the mistake. Cathy couldn't stop laughing when they showed up about an hour later. The best was when I ran off to the bathroom after the ball dropped. Adam put his arm around Cathy's shoulder and said, "Hey, take a picture. This will be my first picture with Mary." Apparently he was dead serious. Mark was dying laughing. In their defense, I saw the pictures from NYE. We did look an awful lot alike.

The girls all dressed up

JJ doing a feaux Greek Table dance

The Tran Family @ Bakkhus
The "twins" and their men

Cathy, um, Mary with Adam