thanksgiving ’17

i love thanksgiving for so many reasons.

the message is clear…give thanks, share, be grateful, gather, love, and this day pretty much kicks off the holiday season! yay! i’m not one to christmas decorate before thanksgiving. don’t get me wrong. i loooooove christmas. it goes by too fast and i love savoring every day leading up to this wonderful holiday but i like to enjoy thanksgiving.

unfortunately, while we were in LA, my parent’s finished basement flooded and that literally put a damper on our thanksgiving plans there. they had to tear up the carpet, move all the furniture, and hire people to fix a myriad of things gone wrong. we have never not had a thanksgiving at my parent’s house, so we were in a pickle. last minute, we decided to host it at our house.

the good news was, my sister kim was doing the cooking! yasssss, that made all the difference! we didn’t mind having everyone over but it definitely made it so much easier on us that we didn’t have to prepare the meal! besides, my sister kim makes a killer thanksgiving feast!

we started our day {as usual} with going to hc’s aunt’s house. she hosts thanksgiving every year and it’s great because his side of the family eats sooo early. the meal is ready by 1pm but it works out so perfect for us because my family eats later {usually around 6 or 7 pm}, so we are able to spend thanksgiving with both our families!

after a few hours there, we parted ways and headed home to host my side of the family. we had such a great time! everything went so smoothly, the food prep was so easy and quick, and we ate at the earliest time we have ever eaten!

i had so much fun, last minute, decorating our place for our ‘first’ turkey day at our house! i made place cards, decorated the tables with the pumpkins we had from halloween, and spruced up some areas of the house with a few festive pieces.

after the delicious dinner, hc had baked sugar cookies for the kiddos to decorate. we pretty much do this every year! it’s so fun for them to decorate and eat the treats! i usually use my holiday cookie cutters but they were too small for the recipe we used {it called for 4″cookie slices and i didn’t want to bake batch upon batch of cookies}, so instead i gave hc my valentine cookie cutters because they were big enough! hahaha!

so the kids had a rainbow table cloth, valentine shaped cookies, and christmas frosting and sprinkles. what a combo! well, no matter…the cookies looked festive and tasted delicious!

well, i have to say that this was a very successful thanksgiving! it was fantastic to have our family over for our first thanksgiving at our house!