thanksgiving & the holiday market & advent calendars

Here is what our holiday season has looked like thus far, starting with Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has slowly been earning more and more stock on my list of favorite holidays over the past few years, it's biting at the heels of Christmas. It's like Christmas, without all the pressure of Christmas, ya catch my drift? Thanksgiving is totally chill and that's how it is supposed to be and I dig it. Plus, I've never been a huge turkey fan, but can you REALLY dislike a holiday dedicated to lavish meals and naps? That on top of all the warm fuzzies from friends and family and recognizing how much you have. I mean really.

Around here we're putting our best foot forward to make this the cheeriest of Christmases. As the only woman in the house I have taken it as my sacred duty to bring the festivity in full force for the men who never realize how wonderfully necessary it is until it has all been done (am i right, ladies?? lets be honest, these things would rarely get accomplished without us). The halls have been decked, the wreaths are out, and the advent house is stuffed with candy.

Side story about advent calendars. Growing up in the Burnham household, we had one sole advent calendar. I had a friend whose Mom got an advent calendar for each kid in the family, and she had the idea right because the advent calendar was a source of much strife for the Burnham children each December. The calendar was this Christmas tree with a golden string that ran from one side of the tree to the other, and on the string were 25 beads. Each day of December you would turn the bead to countdown until Christmas. I don't know what it was about that countdown but it was a family favorite. I'm sure that the star on top of the tree had to be hot glued back on more than once, and as it got old we had to fit the beads over the knots that held the string together, but we held onto that countdown for a long while and I'm not entirely sure when my Mom decided to retire it to its final resting place. You can imagine though, how well it works sharing one thing between five children. No matter the age, every single one of us really just got a thrill from turning that bead each day. I'm fairly certain that Steve would wake up just to turn the bead and then go back to bed (even on weekends!). If you woke up later than everyone else, you were at a HUGE disadvantage because odds are there was at least one person who woke up before you that remembered. It was pretty regularly a conversation of "You turned the bead yesterday!" or, "I haven't turned the bead all month!" You'd think we'd establish some sort of system, but my mom was one who liked to let us figure things out amongst ourselves, and in this case that meant we whined about it for a month and accepted that he who wakes first gets the honor of the ceremonial bead turning. Isn't it funny how some of our memories of what seemed to be terrible at the time (okay, terrible might be an overexaggeration here) turn out to be some of our favorites? One of these days I'm going to have to write about our Lake Powell house boat vacation.

So AAANYWAY for Thanksgiving this year Scott and I were on our own. My Dad flew to Utah to be with the family and all of Scott's family is in Utah as well and since we're flying out for Christmas we decided to stay here for Thanksgiving. We figured, who knows how many Thanksgivings are we going to ever have again where we can just do our own thing? So we embraced it full force and did a non-traditional meal at a Brazilian steakhouse called Fogo de Chao in Minneapolis. Scott was, naturally, in heaven. It was worth it for me just to see him so excited about it, but it was also sooo good. We always have a good time going to fun places like that.

The next day, we went to the Holidazzle Village and Holiday Market in the cities. I will say, we came for the fireworks, but we stayed for the hot fresh apple cider, brats, and European danishes. Holy food coma. There were so many amazing goodies too at the Holiday Market; beautiful hand painted dishware, hand made nativities and ornaments, it was amazing. I really hope we have an opportunity to go back before it closes because it was so cool!

Now we're down to almost a week (whaaat!) until we leave for Utah and I'm trying to decide, do I pack all Scott's presents, open them before we leave, or save them until after?? Important decisions here in my future.