Holiday

[michigangirl723]

What is everyone's favorite Thanksgiving tradition? Mine is that my mom, sister and I watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade every year together....we have since my sis & I were kids. We make a big deal of it....special breakfast including cookies we make, use tea cups we only use during the holidays, etc. Now that we are older and don't live  together, my sis comes to visit from out of state and we stay in our jammies and go over to my mom's. Just a special "girl's morning"....nothing fancy, just special to us and it is the official start of our holiday season!

[kelsey17]

Besides just being together and our lovely meal......i have everyone at my house and a few years back i started a guessing jar filled with different candies, or items, etc and all the grown ups had to make a guess how many items were in the jar............and who got closest to the amount wins a Amazon gift card!!! hahahaha  Plus Thanksgiving is the day we do the Christmas "grab bag" exchange for the grownups so we each only buy one present at Christmas for another family member instead of exchanging with all....

each person fills out a paper chance listing 3 gifts they would like under a certain amount of $$$ put their chances in the pot...then everyone picks and returns it back into the pot if they pick themselves of course.......so this way you only buy one

present and you KNOW it is something the person would want or need.....works great...no unwanted presents!.  Always fun to see who you get!

My husband would say football!

[on the bay]

@kelsey17-

That grab bag choice thing is such a good idea and still keeps some surprise for what everyone will get.

I'm going to remember that for next year!

We decided to do something new this year for Christmas.

We'll each get something the whole family can enjoy. My daughter is bringing a board game; I'm bringing gingerbread houses to make, and we'll see what others do. It could be a treasure hunt, songs-anything.

It will be fun to see what people come up with.

I was thinking we could all go outside and name things that remind us of christmas-like a Christmas walk-that got rolling eyes from my daughters-like ah no mom.

I thought that sounded like fun myself

Oh okay this is about thanksgiving traditions-I guess ours is my daughter the gourmet cook making a great dinner and I like to do dishes.

But I really look forward to Christmas

[lucymo]

I like the grab bag idea.  I shop early so I'm pretty much finished with gift buying by Thanksgiving.  I usually do gift cards now that all are adults but get one gift to wrap and make a pretty package. So, on Thanksgiving we exchange our lists of wants and I choose an item for the one gift.  Most of the other family members shop entirely from the lists that are given on Thanksgiving.

[Desertdi]

My family only celebrated because we were "supposed to"

[Carmie]

We used to do that Christmas gift exchange thingy at Thanksgiving, but I could never come up with anything I wanted or needed, so I asked to drop out.

to my surprise, everyone else wanted to drop out too.  It didn’t make much sense to buy something for someone while they were buying for someone else with the same amount of money.  And, some family member had financial difficulty at christmas time because they had children to worry about and buy for.  It was a win win to drop the exchange.

our traditions is in the prep of the food.  Everything is homemade, no store bought or bakery bought items.  We enjoy many once a year foods that go back to our childhood. And we have blended ethnic foods now because of marriage.  It’s a really enjoyable day to eat and then relax.  My favorite holiday.