Dancing and Doughnuts: They can make or break a religion

Culturally, we're pretty boring. I'm scottish-irish and Hubs is, well, southern? So read: caucasian and boring. Although as a family, we've had traditions (Friday night's pizza, Dad's family reunion is a pig pickin' (yup, you read that right!), mom's family meets up at the beach, Krispy Kreme HDN's on Saturday morning), culturally, we just kind of follow the same old, same old.

After my parents were married, they lived in Alabama (where UP was born) and were very good friends with a couple we called, Grandmas and Uncle Spiro. Uncle Spiro, if you haven't figured by now, is Greek. Very Greek. I can remember sitting at their dining room table and hearing stories about "getting a line out" when making calls from the island, or how, because of greek naming traditions, both sons would have been named "Nick," but thank goodness number 2 was a girl. I loved it!

Flash forward to now, my dear friend, and co-teacher this year is also greek. Very greek. And our town's greek festival was this weekend. And 3 of their four greek children were going to be greek dancing in traditional greek outfits! Time to get our greek on!!

I knew Strip had a birthday party Friday night, but figured Hubs, Nugget and I could scoop her up and head over to Greek Fest for some late night Friday Family Fun. We ended up meeting the birthday girl and family for an early dinner, and birthday mom told me one of the party guests was sick. So, since she already paid for that kid, why not just let Nugget come! We argued back and forth, and ultimately let Nugget go to the all-girls party and Hubs and I had an hour and a half impromptu date (First stop, the library to return an overdue book, then we walked to a little bistro to have a glass of wine al fresco. Half-way through the glass, Hubs points out "some guy taking our picture." I turn to see some guy in a suit, CLEARLY snapping pictures of us. Hubs and I look at each other, and as he walks by, Hubs says, "Oh! That's the mayor." Oh! That makes sense! The mayor is taking our picture on a Friday night. We are awesome. We also, obviously, don't have a whole lot going on in our town!).

We walk back to the party place to collect our kiddos and there they are... in full face paint. And off we go to the Greek Festival to meet our buddies. So now, we not only stick out because of our scottish-irish-southern selves, we are also toting half-unicorn face Strip, and full-face batman Nugget! But regardless of our sore-thumb status, we had a BLAST! There was live music and the kids danced their pants off, and I even hopped in the circle to learn some traditional Greek dancing (It's so easy! Just 1,2,3 4,5,6, 7,8,9,10 then 11,12, and start over again). The kiddos quickly decided they were hungry, so I asked my buddy for something kid-friendly and Greek, and she returned, triumphantly with a basket of loukoumades which are kind of like little doughnut holes and smell like heaven.

At 9:45 we had to DRAG the kids to the car. As we walked by the Greek Orthodox church (which also looks like a golden castle), Strip proclaimed that she loved it here and wished she were Greek. So there you have it. Dancing and doughnuts. Where were you on that one John Wesley?