in The Villages. When retired there is plenty of time on your hands, and what do you do when that happens? You party. I guess we are never too old to enjoy a good time. I started thinking about this the other evening as I was leaving a Christmas Party. Someone said, well this is the first of many. We all laughed and said how right you are. I heard it again last night. We were out to\u00a0dinner\u00a0 and our friend mentioned that the night before he had gone to a Birthday Party and there were about 60 people\u00a0in attendance.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The surprised Birthday Boy, celebrating his 75th, \u00a0gave a very moving speech that he had lived in his last community for over 30 years and only 1 year ago he moved to The Villages. He went on to say that in his last community he did not know 60 people that would come to a party for him, but here in just 1 year he has met so many people through his activities that felt they wanted to celebrate his big day.\u00a0 He was very touched and so were those in attendance, as\u00a0they\u00a0could all identify with his sentiment.\u00a0 Moving is a very stressful event, and moving away from your roots, \u00a0your\u00a0children and grandchildren \u00a0adds to it, so does the fact that you never imagined taking up permanent residency in Florida\u00a0and you are doing it at an age where you don’t want to make life changing decisions.\u00a0 You are retired, \u00a0you don’t want to think of stressful things any more, you left those at the office\u00a0or said good-bye to\u00a0them when the children left home.\u00a0 But here you are making them anyway, against your better judgement and\u00a0yet,\u00a0almost the minute you move here, you realize that my judgement is pretty good, I can still make good decisions and guess what happens?\u00a0\u00a0Your\u00a0new friends are your new family and they love to be \u00a0there for you especially when it comes to celebrating.\u00a0 Birthdays are big, but with the Holidays the parties\u00a0are in abundance, just as someone mentioned, the first of many\u00a0to come.\u00a0\u00a0The invitation to this party came from someone I met at water aerobics,\u00a0today is a party with my neighbors\u00a0at one of the Country\u00a0Clubs,\u00a0\u00a0next week-end I’m attending an Open House party given\u00a0 by a couple that have been here just a year.\u00a0 I think her guest list is up to 90 people.\u00a0 Then there is Sean’s Ambassadors’ Christmas party at Cattle Baron\u00a0Restaurant and I am having my own Open House\u00a0the week before Christmas and lastly but not leastly, a progressive dinner with my New Jersey friends that get together all year long on Thursday nites. January is a busy month also, as some celebrations take place after the New Year.\u00a0\u00a0The get togethers are different here.\u00a0 We are done impressing anybody, we dress very casually and we are normally back home by\u00a010 o’clock, sometimes earlier.\u00a0 Also, there is no pressure, if you don’t\u00a0wish to attend\u00a0parties that’s ok, you don’t have to feel guilty if you don’t\u00a0want to go.\u00a0 When we moved to The\u00a0Villages we left the stress behind and also the guilt, we came here to enjoy our retirement in the sunshine and we\u00a0 respect all \u00a0the different ways\u00a0people do that.\u00a0\u00a0The biggest\u00a0thing is we are here and we can celebrate our choices.\u00a0 That’s the best celebration of all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
in The Villages. When retired there is plenty of time on your hands, and what do you do when that happens? You party. I guess we are never too old to enjoy a good time. I started thinking about this the other evening as I was leaving a Christmas Party. Someone said, well this is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=908"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":916,"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/908\/revisions\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bestvillageblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}