This past weekend, I went away with the girls – mostly sisters – for a nice long weekend of rest, shopping, and food. While we are away we start to coordinate the traditions and celebrations that we do as a family. It’s so much easier to pick days for family parties when many of us are together. December is a very, very busy month.

My primary goal when I was shopping was to get all of the gift bags, wrapping, and tags. What I couldn’t find, I just ordered online. Many of them are food grade bags that I can also use during Thanksgiving, if needed.

Yesterday I planned our Thanksgiving menu and we set an order up on Peapod so all of the non-perishable and baking ingredients will be here this week. Next week, we will do the turkey, other meats, cheeses, and dairy. We decided several years ago to stay home on Thanksgiving and not travel, because we see much of our family during December and Thanksgiving is a great time to cook and sit down with our children and be grateful.

Today I baked bread for two kinds of stuffing, cubed it up and put it in the freezer for next week. Tomorrow I will be cooking a couple of our pumpkins to freeze until I bake pies next week. We ended the season with more than twenty pumpkins, so we are looking forward to all kinds of delicious pumpkin foods this winter. There are enough to make one pie/soup/muffin recipe each week until spring!

I am also gathering together what I need for some other projects and writing out a schedule through the end of the year so 2018 starts with a clean slate and my projects are complete.

I reserved the restaurant for our family party – one of my favorites of the holiday season and ordered our invitations. We have such large families and it’s so good to gather them together in one place, even for just a little while. The holidays, for me, used to be chaotic and stressful, but with planning the holidays are definitely manageable.

I ordered our holiday cards and it’s only a week until we start to decorate for Christmas, but I like this in between time of autumn and winter.  So I hung snowflake lights indoors and I may have put some lights outside on the fence already. =)