Early December happenings

Early December is the start of the holiday season in Puerto Vallarta. Believe me, the stores here are full of Christmas stuff. Actually, some of them are getting pretty thin on lights and things like that. In November, the grocery stores had real Christmas trees.
Beginning December 1 through the 12th is the festival for the Virgin of Guadalupe. She is the patron saint of Mexico and the main church in Puerto Vallarta is a Guadalupe church. There are processions every night and they go all day on the weekend.
Kelly and Deanna were here from Texas for two weeks. We went with them to the processions one night and found out we had it all wrong. As Kelly said, it’s all about the food. The parade is just a backdrop for eating! That's Kelly and Deanna in the picture.
While they we here, we joined the Villa del Palmar party central a couple times. They have a group of friends from the years they have been coming to the Villa del Palmar. Of course we also went our for dinner a few times with them. Ernesto’s still has excellent ribs and tortilla soup. One afternoon Kelly and Deanna came to Bucerias to visit and we ate lunch at Adauto’s.
On December 12th, we decided to go into PV for the festivities. Some of the large hotels had very large floats and bands. The whole procession is amazing. Every group has it’s own Virgin, usually it’s own band and they all sing/play the same song, La Guadalupana. The square and area around the church were very full of people. We missed seeing the fireworks because they went off before the processions ended.
As we were coming home one evening about 7, we passed the group from the Royal Decameron Hotel which is near our house. It is probably 15 miles to the church from here. They had a band playing and many of the people had lit candles. We figured they wouldn’t get downtown until around midnight.
We have decorated our house for Christmas. It’s plenty warm enough to have poinsettias outside. We also have some large decorative poinsettias on the gates and balcony.
We have volunteered to help with Toys for Tots which will be January 6. There are several families who will go out together to distribute toys. It should be lots of fun.