TWIN TOWNS MOM´S RESTAURANT HOLDS CHILDRENS CHRISTMAS PARTY

** Santa Claus greets each child with a present.
** Children at Xmas party 2009-10
** Eating area for children at Mom's Restaurant Christmas Party





MOM´S RESTAURANT HOLDS SUCCESSFUL CHILDRENS CHRISTMAS PARTY

LISA, the proprietor of MOM´s Restaurant and she is the third generation of the Williams family to have a MOM´s Restaurant in Belize, over the past 45 years. Anyway, Lisa with a bunch of kids of her own, organized a Christmas Party for the poorer kids of the TWIN TOWNS out here in Western Belize. She got some volunteers, donations gifts and wrapping paper and generally herded a lot of volunteer people together to make it happen. The Christmas party expected to cater to 300 to 400 young children, with each being given a present

SURPRISE! SURPRISE! Somehow around 600 and 700 children showed up with their parents. Hopefully there were Christmas presents for each one. Yet to find that out! There was a Santa Clause and what I saw on the local TWIN TOWNS ¨"PLUS TV" local cable TV channel on the PANDY SHOW it seemed like all the children got a present. I could see LISA moving around keeping things moving on the video.

For a couple of years we had a Salvation Army family out here in the TWIN TOWNS, but the last couple of years they seem to have disappeared, which is disappointing. Without the SALVATION ARMY we don´t really have any organizational stuff like this Christmas Party here, and it is needed. MOM´S RESTAURANT is on the boulevard of the by-pass road, just past Sacred Heart College on the opposite side, going around the center of San Ignacio Town side of the Macal River, which divides the TWIN TOWNS of San Ignacio and Santa Elena Town.
Lisa got some financial backing from expats living in the area and just opened her restaurant venture early in 2009. Her MOM ( Sue ) had another such restaurant in the port of Belize City, until rising rents forced her to keep moving away from the downtown business center and eventually she went bankrupt. Her mother´s mother, Lisa´s grandmother, ran a MOM´s restaurant, the first Mom´s Restaurant at the foot of the SWING BRIDGE in the center of the port of Belize City on the coast, for several decades until she died. The old lady, Lisa´s grandmother sailed from California in a homemade 30 ft tri'maran with her son, Jim Black, back in the 1960's down the North and Central American coast, and came through the Panama Canal eventually ending up in what was then the colony of British Honduras. The son´s name was Jim Black and he eventually bought a piece of river bank and dug it out and built a marina, which he sold in his old age and retired to a citrus farm on the Hummingbird Highway. While his mother built and ran the famous MOM´s Restaurant of those decades. Sue her daughter grew up there, as did her daughter Lisa. All of this early expat USA pioneer family to British Honduras enjoyed dual citizenship. They just could not fit into the lifestyle of the USA. It cost too much for one thing up in the states, besides being overregulated, expensive and crowded. This LISA, with the THIRD MOM´s Restaurant, now out Western Belize are a relatively famous local pioneer frontier family. Mom´s restaurant has always been a favorite of the expat crowd particularly, locals and Mennonites. Often they were the only good restaurant in town. They also were a center of rural gossip, a place to park things you bought on your trip to town when shopping, before returning to the outer jungles, farms, ranches and offshore cayes. I remember it always as a place to catch up on gossip of people in remote areas of the country, pioneering in what back then, were really primitive conditions. It was always great fun though and fond memories. If I had to live my life over, I would do it all again.