Happy New Year!

NYE .... To me, it's a name, but once a year our name becomes an acronym and makes headlines all over the media.  New Year's Eve.  And as usual, we celebrated the end of the year with good friends and family.
We enjoyed good food, fireworks, fun and fellowship all evening at the Rockhold home.
After taking the men home, the NYE girls (Gariann, Bobbie and Susie) went "first footing" and surprised Erma Potts!  Erma brought the first footing tradition to us from her hometown.  We learned today that the tradition originated in Scotland.  It was the grandmother of the little girl who was flower girl at George and Erma's wedding who brought the first footing tradition to Dana, Indiana.  When George and Erma came to Keokuk they shared that tradition with their congregation.  Basically, it's being the first visitor to come calling in the new year.  The way it was done then was that one would go to the home of another to make the first call of the year, and then those folks would join their visitors to go on and visit another person.  Each person receiving first footers would then join the group and proceed to the next place to visit.  Eventually, the group would wind up having breakfast together....often at the last home visited.
We didn't proceed beyond Erma's home this morning, but we did take her by total surprise.  We arrived just minutes after midnight and stood on the porch playing harmonica, clarinet and banging pans.  We made so much noise the neighbors were turning on lights, but Erma was back in her kitchen with the radio on and didn't even hear us.  We feared the neighbors would call the police, so we went to the back porch and started making noise.  Finally, Erma came to see what all the racket was about.   I didn't get the picture of when she met us at the door, but we did take a couple snapshots once we were invited inside.