How do we celebrate holidays?

We celebrated a whole list of holidays while we were staying in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas this winter. Some of the holidays are well known. For example, we celebrated Valentine's Day at a local dance.

Denisa celebrated her love for Mark by making a card for him. (yawn)

Mark's gift was much more elaborate. He spent the morning making a red home-made pie crust and pie filling. He lined up his ingredients, including red toasted coconut, and a stencil for sprinkling it on the finished pie. He also used hearts to decorate the present of a new watch to count all those steps that Denisa gets in line dance.

She's a happy Valentine with that special red coconut cream pie to celebrate this holiday.

On Ground Hog Day, our park organized a scavenger hunt to celebrate. The game involved going all over the park, completing tasks like counting bird houses, or measuring statues, or putting on the park's green. 

We are proud to report that we won a free ice cream dessert for our successful performance in the Ground Hog Day scavenger hunt. We are glad that the ground hog didn't see his shadow, so we are hoping that spring is on the way. We've heard some complaints that this has been a cold winter for South Texas. We've had some brutally cold days when it barely got up to 60 degrees! The average high is supposed to be in the mid-70s, and many "winter Texans" were ready for warmer temperatures here. People were wearing big coats and hats at our next south Texas holiday.

We are at the Winter Texan Fiesta in Mission, Texas, to celebrate this holiday. You see, if there isn't enough holidays on the calendar, they invent new ones to celebrate. The fiesta included a free lunch, and free entertainment provided by two of the performers that spend their winters traveling to resorts all over this valley.

We did lots of dancing on the asphalt during the Winter Texan Fiesta, and found it was a good way to keep warm on a nippy day.

Another day that was invented in our resort is one to honor the park's latest king and queen. We celebrated with cake and punch. We include the picture of Denisa's Mother, who looks like she dressed to match the robes of the royalty.

Even lesser-known holidays are reason to celebrate among the retired folks down here. For example, we celebrated "Pi Day." If you've forgotten your math skills, Pi is the number represented by the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter--or 3.14. So the 14th day of the third month (3-14) we celebrated Pi Day by baking pies. At 3:14 on 3-14 we met to taste all the pies. Denisa picked a pie recipe out of the new Bentsen Grove recipe book. This was her first ever frozen peanut butter pie.

Each pie was cut into 16 pieces so there were plenty of pieces to share. While Denisa signed up to bring a pie . . .

Mark signed up to taste pie on Pi Day. Denisa took a picture of some of the men in the front of the pi line. Yes Mark is right in the middle of the guys planning to get first choice of all those pies.

Aren't those delicious pictures of pie for pi day?

Just three days later, our park was in full swing to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. We waited outside for the decorated golf carts to come down our street, and we weren't disappointed. 

A line of around 30 golf carts zig-zagged their way through every street in the resort.

When a friend saw us watching the parade, they encouraged us to join them. So we jumped aboard their golf cart and suddenly became part of the parade. This is Darlene and Patrick. Patrick was named for St. Patrick's Day, as he is celebrating a birthday today. This is when we learned that while many of the parade participants throw candy to the spectators, some of the spectators serve refreshments to the parade participants. What fun!

The day's festivities also included a green poker run, where we collected a playing card (and treats) at seven different houses. We had 130 people participate in the St. Patrick's Day poker run. The best poker hands won cash prizes, but we all won delicious snacks and tasty beverages. We finished our Irish holiday by eating corned beef and cabbage for dinner.

So that's a summary of how we celebrate some well-known (and lesser known) holidays here in South Texas. It seems that if the calendar doesn't include enough festivities, we just make up our own special days to celebrate.