2001 Party Recap

The 2001 Mullen Christmas party was held at Paul & Marilynn's house in Cranbury at the traditional date and time:  the Saturday after New Year's starting at 2:00pm in the afternoon.  Turnout was a little lower than expected, due mostly to illness.  It is reported that one family was unable to attend because they locked themselves out of their own house.  This sounded like a form of mental illness, though, so I included it under the general category of illness.  When all was said and done, we still had about 50 people at the party. 

The great thing about hosting an event like this is that every family contributes by bringing something:  a bottle of wine, an appetizer, an entree, a dessert.  Imagine our surprise, though, when we uncovered Aunt Pat and Uncle Harry's contribution and found baked macaroni and cheese with about one-third of it gone!  Chris & Mary didn't know what to make of it.  They decided not to put it out right away, but to serve it later in the day when no one would think it strange.  I took it as a compliment ("They're so comfortable with us they bring us their leftovers!").  Uncle Harry clued us in as to what really happened with an email a couple of days later.  (Click here).

There was plenty of food and drink.  It was said that you could take a bath in the red wine that was left over.   Joe Benco got to the party just in time, fittingly, to "kick the keg", a  small 5 liter keg of Dab beer.  It was purchased more as a novelty than anything else.  We should have purchased a quarter-keg instead, but Tom Kinslow vetoed that idea.  Chris did a fantastic job on the lasagna, but she did get a little flustered when taking it out of the oven.  Eschewing pot-holders as being too bourgeois, she grabbed a common kitchen towel to take it out of the fired-up 450º oven.  If you were outside of the kitchen, you might have smelled a faint odor of burning cloth in the air.  If you were inside the kitchen, though, you saw a kitchen towel ablaze [Exhibit A] .   Being the consummate professional, though, Chris simply downed a couple of glasses of red wine and rejoined the party.

To see some photos of the event, click here.  See you all at the next gathering!

     Paul