Have any Thanksgiving traditions?

I do, even though it's not meant to be tradition... I end up baking dessert the morning of Thanksgiving to take to Uncle David's (per caitie) house. Michael doesn't like me baking the day of a planned family gathering, my baking usually makes us late. But it seems to happen no matter how hard I try to avoid it. I turn on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for the girls to watch while I'm baking. I must admit, I do love the smell of somethin' sweet bakin' while watching somethin' good on TV. Not that I'm much into parades, but there's something about the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade that I enjoy... maybe it's the location... NYC, and it being cold there, and the history linked to that particular parade... or somethin' like that. Anyway, I did try to do all the baking the night before... I started to just take the acorn cookies Caitie made, but decided there weren't enough of them and decided at the last minute to make some chocolate chip pretzel cookies, that are actually brownies, but they're called cookies for some reason... don't ask me why... and I decided this at about midnight the night before Thanksgiving. Michael decided it was okay for me to get some sleep before bakin' the brownies... I mean cookies, or whatever you wanna call 'em... and just do them the next mornin'. I should have left well enough alone... they turned out awful! The pretzel crust was... well... there was too much of it! Long story... one Michael would rather I didn't go into, I'm sure, since he helped me with that part. I'll let you wonder about that. ha Here are some pics from the night before Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving Day...

Caitie makin' the cute Acorn Cookies.



She did a really good job!



Aren't they cute? :)



Thanksgiving Day. The girls were waiting for me to finish getting ready to go. They were already taking a nap, and they hadn't even had any turkey yet. ha



One of the things Caitie looked forward to at Uncle David's was playing with the three dogs. Here she's playing fetch with one of the dogs.



She loves to play pool too...



She usually tries to hit a ball into a pocket by hitting it with another ball, but she decided to try a pool stick this time... it wasn't long before she went back to doing it the way she loves best... ball hitting ball into pockets.



Remember my mentioning our fifty somethin' Caddy last Thanksgiving? Well, it's still at David's house. It's been there over a year now. It won't be long before it's home though, they're almost done workin' on it. It will soon be fully restored. I didn't get many pics of Bailey, but you can see her in this pic... a bit blurry.



I finally got to drive the Caddy. My two girls, their daddy, and their Uncle David let me drive them around the block a couple of times. The Caddy has no seatbelts, the steering is a bit off, and there are no brakes... it reminded me of my '67 Mustang. It was a bit disconcerting to try and stop a 3000 ton (?) (all i know is it's big and heavy) vehicle that has hardly any brakes... I was told this while trying to stop; the brake pedal went all the way to the floor before the car even began to slow down. Yes, it brought back memories of that ol' Mustang of mine. I'm happy to report that we made it safe and sound back to the house.



Another fun thing to do at Uncle David's is play the slot machine. With that and the pool table, it's almost like bein' in Vegas... we were just wishin' there was an actual payout... she kept getting three in a row.



She hit the jackpot (get it? the above pic, and now mentioning 'jackpot'... um, yeah. i need to stop writing posts at such a late hour) when it came to Tinkerbell stuff... one of David's inlaws gave Caitie a bunch of Tinkerbell stuff. Caitie loved it.



And that, my friends, was our Thanksgiving. Oh... I forgot to mention, we did head to Kohl's at midnight for their Black Friday sale. We walked in, and walked back out about 30 seconds later... we should have known better than to go in after seeing the full parking lot. It was a madhouse! No surprise there. We decided to not try any other stores after that.