what to do on xmas

I have two more guest bloggers scheduled this week but I had to interrupt the scheduled programming to address the age old question, what do Jews do on Christmas Day? We don't have trees to gather around or presents to open up or family coming over for a giant meal. So with nothing to celebrate or nowhere to go we did what all good Jews should do, we traveled to Monterey Park.

Monterey Park is a neighborhood East of downtown Los Angeles with a very large Chinese population. On Christmas morning it took us 18 minutes to get there from Venice. With normal LA traffic it's somewhere between one and two days. 

We made the trek along with three other families to eat dim sum. My wife organized the outing. After doing much research she determined that the Elite Restaurant had the best dim sum in all of LA. I haven't tried all the dim sum in LA so I can't say with the utmost certainty if this is true but I have to imagine Elite is hard to beat. I know this because I don't even like dim sum and this was awesome. 

 

The place was jammed pack with mostly Chinese and a few non-assimilated Jews. Unlike other dim sum places, they don't walk around with trays of food to pick from, you have to actually order. They provide a very detailed menu describing all the options and accompanied by pictures. We ate tons and tons of stuff. I'd love to tell you everything we had but it was all in Chinese. 

 

It was a terrific experience and the start of a new Solomon Family Christmas Tradition. Now here's the best part. Four families. Fifteen People. An endless amount of servings and a few beers thrown in for good measure. Total bill sans tip, $178. If that isn't a great Jewish Christmas than what is?

 

Of course, we followed up the meal with an afternoon matinee. We went to see "Sherlock Holmes". My suggestion, skip "Sherlock Holmes" and go right to the dim sum. Much more tasty and ten times more entertaining.