Holidays

I was about to put up pictures of our Christmas tree when I realized I never put up any Thanksgiving pictures. So before I start anything Christmas, I'd better get the old stuff out of the way!

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend. Thanksgiving Day was spent with Kevin's family at his brother's house. Delicious food, Wii Mario Kart, building blanket forts, and a cranberry trivia game were some of the highlights.

I almost didn't do any Black Friday sales, but then caved at the last second...to the midnight sales. I was just going to head out "for a few minutes," and only went to two stores but it took me until 3am! Arg, I'm not a fan of the new midnight start to Black Friday. :oP Abby and I went out again in the late morning after Jake went down for his nap. I got a decent amount of Christmas shopping done and we got a few great deals (our best one was a new cordless phone that we desperately needed...two of the numbers buttons on the old phone rarely worked any more!), but overall it wasn't one of my better years.

The following day we celebrated Thanksgiving with the Gardner family here at our house. Although it's a lot of work having 18 people at my house, it's always lots of fun for me to get my china out and do a bit of decorating. A highlight this year for me was playing Bunco - a fun game that enabled all the adults to play (12 in all!). And, of course, my brother's "smart-phoning" family with all their game apps always draws much interest from Ben and Abby.

Ben checking out the smartphone with cousin Solomon.

But now we're already full-swing into the next holiday, the best one in my opinion: CHRISTMAS!! I was quite pleased with my ever-the-procrastinator-self to get the tree up this past Sunday evening. I do believe that is a record for us. And we were completely finished and all cleaned up by 7:30, which is also a record I believe (I'm usually such a perfectionist about the decorating that it takes me FOREVER to get the tree done :). The kids did a good job this year and seemed to get the hang of spreading the ornaments out - I only found a few "ornament clusters" in the back of the tree. :o) We listened to Christmas music and had such a lovely family evening together. Just as it should be.