Incase you don’t live on the east coast, this is the current view of my porch…

Where are the stairs??

I took these through the window since I wouldn’t dare to open the door.. I attempted and the snow just blew in my face. The wind is blowing the snow everywheeere, as you can tell by the fact that our little pre-lit trees by our front door are covered.

Though I wish we would have had a chance to pick up some paint or curtains before the storm hit so that we could be productive, we are actually quite cozy sitting around the house eating all of our Christmas leftovers. It sure helped that we made these a few nights ago…

And these…

Aaaand these…

Mike’s creative side seems to come out in the form of pretzels. I think it’s the only decorating that is quick enough to hold his attention. He actually started the process without me while I was still throwing cookies in! 🙁

The best cookie of the night?

The Macky cookie. That is my husband’s handwriting. Quite scary that sometimes you can’t really tell our writing apart.

It may be scarier that it’s still snowing and we’re down to like, 5 cookies. I’m going to have to invest in some Pajama Jeans after this weekend. Thank God we finally got a snowblower!!!

Our first Thanksgiving went off without a hitch.  My tablescape was threatened Wednesday night when the Macky Monster woke up and discovered what I had done….

Of course he went straight for the twigs, which was okay because a) they are fully organic and can’t hurt him and b) they were free.  If he chewed them off I’d just go pick some more!

But surprisingly, he investigated for a few minutes and then walked away, TABLE UNDAMAGED.  It was a Thanksgiving miracle! Even throughout the night, the table remained perfect.  This gives me hope for future decor…as long as I manage to set things up while he’s not around.  Once things are up he generally doesn’t care, but if you’re doing something and not paying attention to him? He will do his best to wreck your plans. Such a puppy.

Thanksgiving day was also our first snow while living here.  It did snow on the house once while it was being built, but that doesn’t count, right?

It started off as small flurries, so small that I thought I saw a single flake and told Mike, then I was like naaah, probably just something falling from a tree.  But then we started getting big flakes that were blowing about.

Here’s our kitchen in the midst of the Thanksgiving chaos, before dinner. Since we’re vegetarian and I really did not want to touch a turkey, my mom brought it.

Much to my delight, the centerpiece was not only pretty, but functional.  I kept it low enough that it managed to stay on the table all day, and is still there! Here’s the table right before we ate, made a little more functional with one of the table extensions in, placemats (to protect our solid wood, non-glossy Ikea table), napkins and utensils.  We put all of the food out on the island, buffet style, to save room.

And then I stopped taking pictures.  Until I sat down with my plate and thought MY GOSH THAT IS A LOT OF FOOD. This was taken with my iPhone, because nothing ruins a meal like getting up and being like wait, wait! I need to get my giant camera to take pictures for my blog!

Mixed in that plate there is… sweet potato casserole, stuffing, spaghetti squash, corn, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, broccoli and carrots au gratin. Yes I ate the gravy, it’s once a year and I can’t turn down my mom’s homemade gravy on my potatoes.  Not included in this picture is the cranberry sauce, appetizers or desserts.  Oh and the lasagna we ate before this meal.  I will never be able to button my pants again.

That being said, we have enough leftovers to last a lifetime. I realized this when I opened my fridge this morning.

We completely emptied our fridge before Thanksgiving, so all of those containers have leftovers in them.  We tapped into some of them tonight.

We will never go hungry again.

I hope all of you had a happy one!

This is a partial view our dining room…

You will be seeing some more of this room in the next few days since Mike and I are hosting Thanksgiving! Yay!

This particular wall is home to our Ikea Vurm wine racks.  Each side has two wine racks, holding 4 bottles each.  We have had these wine racks for years- we had 3 of them in a line in our condo dining room.  We knew they were definitely something we wanted to keep around, but since we have a larger space we decided to buy a fourth rack.

They are quite empty tonight, it’s been a rough few weeks okay! 😉 So before the holidays we are going to replenish.  I love going to the liquor store… no for the reason you would think… but because of this pretty label…

And this one…

And doesn’t this just sound like a party?

Yes, I choose wines based on their labels.  I also judge books by their covers. I’m sure a somewhere a connoisseur is cringing, but I like to think of them as art or conversation pieces.  My current favorite?

Is that our house??

I love it.  Not just the simplicity of the label, but that you come to our house and you get…. house wine.  Get it? Okay it’s a little lame… but it’s cute and I’m tempted to buy a case.

Maybe with just a slight revision…

🙂

*Update: House Wine is apparently made by Magnificent Wine and they have a bunch of fabulous other labels! Table wine is a goody as well!*

The Oreos obviously bit the dust.  Besides Oreos, I also have an unhealthy love for Stauffer’s animal crackers. When I was in college, I used to buy the giant bear shaped tub.  I have since learned to stick to the mini sized bag often available in the dollar bins at Target.

No I didn’t trace that horse, though I tried.  That right there is pure artistic talent. And yes, I did smear the writing 🙁  One of the downfalls of working with chalk.

After we made our chocolate covered pretzels, my mom (knowing my love for animal crackers) brought over chocolate covered animal crackers.  How come I didn’t think of that! I suppose it was our rookie attempt at chocolate covered pretzels and we didn’t think outside the box of what we could possibly dip in that chocolate.  Next time I’m dipping whatever is in the fridge…..

I didn’t plan on decorating the inside of our house for any holidays other than Christmas (see our outside fall decor here), but when I spotted these pumpkins at Crate and Barrel I had to have them.

I bought one of the medium sized ones and two of the mini sized ones.  I planned to use them make a whole centerpiece arrangement on our table for our first Thanksgiving.  Then we decided to do an impromptu Halloween gathering Saturday with both of our families, so I figured I’d put them out early.  Problem was, I didn’t have the rest of my table scape ready!  I ran to Target to find the runner I wanted but they were out, so I decided to just stick the pumpkins on our Ikea Stornas buffet for the day.

Then I remembered that we had some tiny pumpkins from the farm I could mix in…

If I only had this blog to document the Ikea dining room furniture fiasco back in April.  Someday I will have to go back and cover the dining room stuff we already have!

At like 11pm on Friday night I decided to make chocolate covered pretzels.  Mike thought I was crazy, but I love decorating…and decorating things I can eat?? even better! So I set out to do the pretzels on my own, but Mike ended up enjoying the process and helped out.  Maybe even dominated the pretzel game…

We started getting creative along the way and decided to smash up some of the halloween candy we bought…

So now we still have more than two full bags of halloween candy, leftover pumpkin pie, chocolate cake, pumpkin roll, pumpkin cake, chocolate covered animal crackers that my mom bought and some chocolate covered pretzels left.  The next kid to ring the doorbell gets a piece of cake….

Happy Halloween everyone!