Thanksgiving

Holidays can be a little hard here in Minnesota when we are so far away from family.  Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays, it is also one of the hardest to be away from family.  The last couple years we have gotten together with some good friends of ours.  This year we hosted, and I really wanted to make sure it was fun.

My wonderful, fun sister gave me a great idea to get some fun white elephant gifts and make them the prizes for some games.  She came out for my birthday and helped me shop for these wonderful prizes.  We found some pretty spectacular stuff at Goodwill.  We even had a lady following us around eyeing the stuff in the cart.  She came up to us while we were checking out and told us we had some really beautiful stuff, and she was serious. 

One thing I love about holidays is the festiveness in the air.  Without even being asked the kids all joined me in the kitchen just to be together.  I love it!  Of course we were making desserts so the hope for a few broken Oreos may have also motivated a few.

For our games we made a tournament bracket which spurred on some fun competitiveness.  One of our games was a turkey shoot with nerf guns and balloons.  I'm still finding nerf darts hidden in very strange places.  Of course the kids may have used them for more than shooting balloons. 

My brackets weren't quite accurate so our friend Eric made sure to correct them.  Hint - don't make tournament brackets with sports junkies around.

It seemed that the most popular game was a dance off on the wii.  We had some pretty good laughs.

These were the grand prizes.  I wrapped all the prizes up so nobody could see what they were getting.  How could you not want a fuzzy yak?  It now resides in our seminary room.

Erin won the Victorian cat.  Funny side note, my family in Utah did the same thing and found the cat's long lost twin.  Amazing to think there are actually two of them in the world.