My holiday experience

 The holidays are always a good time to spend time with family, this is the second year Im away from my family during christmas and New Year,  but here I live with my cousin, his wife and their baby so Im not completely alone.

My cousin's wife serves in the Air Force so a few weeks before Christmas she had to travel to Texas for work and we weren't sure if she would be back in time for Christmas, so a few days before Christmas I was doing some Christmas shopping with my cousin, which was quite stressful because there was a lot of traffic and all the stores were full, we are Guatemalan and Puerto Rican and my cousin's wife is Peruvian so Christmas is also a mix of cultures. Also, December 24th is my cousin's birthday so we celebrate her birthday too. Fortunately, my cousin's wife returned to Pooler on December 23rd so the 24th was the big day.

On the 23rd at night we prepared the meal and waited until midnight to cheers my cousin on her birthday. In the morning we sang happy birthday to her and continued getting everything ready for the midnight dinner, we wrapped the presents and around 7 we went to my uncle's house where we were all going to meet to celebrate Christmas, We had dinner at 8 and while the children were putting all the presents under the tree, we were preparing everything for the midnight meal. We sang happy birthday again and ate cake while we all had a good time. At midnight we ate Guatemalan tamales, pasteles (Puerto Rican tamales), pernil, arroz relleno, pollo y papas con salsa huancaina I'm sure there was more food, but I can't remember it right now, then we all gathered in the living room to open presents, and around 2 in the morning we returned home, on the morning of December 25th we only ate leftover food and talked about the night before, then we watched movies and drank hot chocolate with paneton and quesillo.

New Years was a little different, my friends asked me if I wanted to go to Disney so we left on the 30th in the morning, and spent the day in Orlando, exploring the city and on the 31st we woke up early to start the adventure, we arrived at Disney World and started at Animal Kingdom, then we moved to Magic Kingdom and then we spent a few hours at Hollywood Studios, to finally arrive at Epcot, at Epcot we had dinner and waited until midnight to see the fireworks. We were very tired because we had walked all day trying to get through all the parks, and there were a lot of people. Maybe it wasn't the best idea, but we had a great time.

Even though I wasn't with my parents and siblings, I was surrounded by kind people who cared about me and when I missed my family they were always cheering me up.