A Homemade Thanksgiving

I apologize for the major slacking on my part, I am not keeping up my end of the bargain with three posts a month. But it has been quite a busy week with planning a Christmas party, shopping, decorating, cooking, working, marketing, staging houses, renting houses, and all while trying to focus on my two boys.  Thanksgiving was a nice break away from all of this, I spent a few days with my family and the rest in Philly, getting ready for our holiday open house.
Of course our Thanksgiving included an entirely homemade menu, including our great grandmothers famous bread recipe (speaking of which, I wish I had some rolls right about now!). Bf joined our family for dinner, dessert, and crafts along with our adopted Aunt J and Uncle G. This year I remembered to get pictures too!

Ry Ry waiting for Grandpa to "drop" some Turkey goodness

I overheard my Mom talking about these turky salt and pepper shakers. She explained how they have always been on our Thanksgiving table and when she's in a nursing home, we need to make sure we take them with us wherever we go. Nice Mom, real nice.

I'd like to swim in this creamy, butter filled heaven

But what I really want to tell you about was our advent calendar activity. Every year we try to create a Christmas craft for Thanksgiving evening. We are usually excited to move onto the next holiday and theres nothing like creating a little decoration to get us in the spirit. Remember my post about DIY calendars? Well, we did the last one together for our craft this year. After a few mishaps (we forgot the numbers and were sent 120 mini tins, rather than a variety), we managed to each get together a few tins to hang on our fridges. These surprises I blame entirely on the Co. because I am way too "on top of things" to make such a mistake. Once I got over the disappointment of the craft not turning out the way I wanted it to, we made the best with what we had. Big Sis decided to use hers for holiday picture magnets since she doesn't' have enough room for 25 tins anyway! The rest of us got creative with how we could make a calendar with only twelve tins.

Big Sis' didn't need numbers, so she used cute words and decorations.

There's nothing like relaxing and having the time to be creative. We all lost ourselves in the craft and best of all, made some awesome looking advent tins! Here are some of the things I will put inside, for my daily Christmas surprises:
Watch your favorite Christmas movie with treats
Drive around to see the holiday lights
Decorate Christmas cookies
Make hot chocolate - don’t forget the marshmallows!
Sweet treats like chocolate covered pretzels or Christmas candies

Once I get the remaining tins in the mail, we can finally finish our project and I will add a picture of the finished product. What kind of advent calendar do you have this year?