The Christmas Train is Here!

Well, that was a nice little holiday. Now it's time to get back in the groove. I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. We did. We have this family tradition called "Pie Night", which takes place on Wednesday evening, and it really takes a lot of pressure off of Thursday cooking. (And Thursday eating!) We make all our pies before the holiday, and we get together as family and friends on the night before Thanksgiving, and have some cold cuts and snack-y foods, and then stuff our faces with pies! After eating Thanksgiving dinner, there is no room for pies, so we do dessert first! We all bring different kinds of pie, and that way we have a big variety to choose from. We've been doing this for a long time. We got this tradition from my oldest son's first wife and we love it! We don't have anyone to share it with here in Oregon, yet, but we had Pie Night nonetheless. I hope the rest of the family had it where they are.

Thursday, itself, was a fairly slow, kick-back day. I cooked the turkey in the electric roaster I got a couple of years ago, and that makes life easier, too, because there's no rush to bake rolls and extra stuffing and yams after the turkey gets out of the oven--my oven is free the whole day. I just wish I had figured a few of these things out a long time ago. Thanksgiving doesn't have to be rush, rush, rush. It can be relaxed, with time to spend with the family. Oh, and to watch the parade! I love the parade!

The rest of the weekend was spent doing projects with the kids and starting the decorating for the next holiday!

This is our mantel, where there used to be a wood-burning stove but now the TV is there. This is the train that my Dad made many years ago. It is very large and needs a long space to put it, and it hasn't been out for a long time. The mantel is just barely long enough to hold it!

One thing that my husband and I did was go looking for branches for a project of mine. We went to a little wayside and took a walk in the woods to find some branches we could "prune" and take home. We would probably have gotten in a lot of trouble if we got caught...good thing we didn't, huh? I laid the branches out and got an idea of which way to turn them. I trimmed off some of the small branches and left others, so that I would still have some greenery but not too much. Then I tied one end of them together and and twisted them and wove them together to make a swag. Then my son hung it up on the porch for me and I hung some big Christmas balls on it (my mother made them about 30 years ago), and it looks real nice. I think it would have looked even better if we had one in each section of the porch, but hubby wasn't going back for more, so I had to make do with just one. In the other sections, I hung some cute snowflake ornaments I got at Cracker Barrel at an after Christmas sale at a REALLY good price. They are too big to hang on my tree, because my trees are never that big, but I liked them and I knew I could use them somewhere, so I've carried them around for about 6 years!

I don't have the lights and garland, etc. up yet. One step at a time, please. You can't see it very well, but the white snowflake has a snowman face in the middle. It's really cute!

Well, that's enough rambling for today. Back tomorrow with a project! Until then remember..."every great dream begins with a dreamer." Harriet Tubman