Mackenzie's 6, Thanksgiving and Black Friday

We celebrated Mackenzie's birthday on Nov 21. We had planned on taking her, her cousins and a couple friends to the pool for open swim and having a party at home afterwards. As it happens every year it snowed on the day of her party so the roads were crap. But when you're 6 you usually love playing in the snow, so we had a "play in the snow" party at home. All of the kids had a great time and it was the least pressured party we have ever had going on our own time table. 

After her party, all of the family went to Blaze pizza for dinner. You are able to get your own pizza with anything you want on it. And it's a good choice for the whole family because the Mason's are able to have everything vegan. Everyone's happy!

The Lash and Mason kids were able to spend the night with Papa and GG that's and night and had a blast. 

Sunday was Taylor's 13th birthday so we all had brunch Sunday morning and had her presents. Thinking about my baby sister being 13 makes me feel old. I really can't believe she's already a teenager.

The next Thursday was Thanksgiving. With the fact that we have so much family and our parents are not together, we always have multiple holidays. That gives us a better chance of having a good time though.

On Thanksgiving we went to my grandmas house. I really enjoy going there because I never get to spend enough time with her. Some of the rest of my family however are not the most enjoyable so we didn't stay long.

Afterwards, we went to Uncle Doug's (Carols brother). We always have a good time with all of them and we always stay too late! There's so much good food and good company. The beauty is that many are not family and we come together just like family does. And we usually all get along better also.

We had Thanksgiving with Marty's family on Saturday. We used to do it on Thanksgiving but his mom always hosts and she works at Walmart on the night shift. With their Black Friday sales starting at 6 Thursday night she had to be to work 5 hours early because they needed the extra help for all of the crazies. Anyways, we always have a good time with his family as well. They don't have only the traditional food either. You will find unsociables (cream cheese and onion or pickle wrapped in ham), and even macaroni and cheese. And there's always some new dessert or appetizer to try. This year it was homemade cookie dough. Turns out, I love that stuff and probably gained 10 lbs from that. 

Finally, we don't do the Black Friday stuff. We always put up our Christmas stuff on Friday. Marty usually works and he doesn't like putting stuff out so it works out perfectly. We have a few new decorations this year. I found a porcelain nativity scene at a garage sale this summer and put it up for the first time.

You can also see in the photo above, I decided to use stocking hangers instead of putting them on the wall. I like this set up much better. The other new decoration was some wooden letters that Marty's mom gave me which spell out JOY. They were a plain, unstainable wood so I decided to paint them and I love how they turned out. All of us decided how they would be painted.

You can't tell in the picture but the red and green are sparkly. That was the choice of Mackenzie's. I couldn't decide on dots or strips so Cameron said he liked stripes better. Finally I wasn't planning on using the white but Marty thought it would just finish it off if I had that between each stripe. As it turns out it looked much better with the white. 

After those the only thing added was 300 lights on the tree and I love having more.