This year’s turnout at the annual Burns Family Hotel Christmas dinner was phenomenal! 58 people!!! This is a tradition that my grandparents started waaaay back in the day. It’s changed ever so slightly but still has that good old fashioned family feeling. We used to always go to the Hotel Syracuse (when it was still in business), get a big long table, and eat the most delicious tomato soup on the planet. Well, big long table is still part of Christmas dinner, and there’s tomato soup (although a different kind), but the Hotel Syracuse is no longer. The Double-Tree does a nice job, thankfully, and puts up with the food-throwing (my cousins- younger AND older), so we appreciate it. And it’s a place for us to all get together and reconnect after a year (sometimes more!) of living our busy lives.

My dad comes from a family of 6 boys. He’s the youngest so a lot of my uncle’s children are older now with families of their own. As a little kid I always thought my family was large– and every year it keeps getting larger! Here’s some pics of our “Hotel Christmas Dinner”: