Thanksgiving Weekend

     So, for the Thanksgiving holiday, we invited over some friends of ours, their sister and her boyfriend, and some single guys from base.  Chad and I made the turkey.  We did a apple cider brine on the turkey, which we started the day before.  We also made sweet potatoes, wheat rolls, pumpkin pie, a pumpkin roll, fruit and appetizers.  From our guests we had, mac n' cheese, mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, coconut cream pie and cinnamon bread.  Of course, we had TONS of left overs once it was all said and done.  Including ourselves, we had nine people here and three dogs.  There was a lot of puppy love.  Chad and I took the opportunity to break out the china and flatware as well.  We have it, we might as well use it.  Even though we only had 5 sets of the flatware and had to use our every day stuff to fill in the gaps.  It was a lot of fun having everyone over and we really enjoyed ourselves.
     We very well may have lost our minds after that because we decided to go with our friends to Black Friday shopping.  We met them at 8pm to drive to Toys R Us at 9pm to wait for the store to open at 10.  Chad and I were able to get our Toys for Tots shopping done there before we went to Walmart (shudder).  We did get some fabulous deals on movies there before we went on to Old Navy (flop, we looked around and left without getting anything), and Best Buy.  We also ended up going through JC Penny (we got the limited edition snow globe at the door), Sears and Palmetto Moon which is a local store that sells gear for the two main South Carolina college football teams and other local gear.  We ended at Lowes where we got a few sweet deals before heading home at 6:30am.  Chad and I went home.  They kept going ... their animals, I kid you not.  What did we learn from this experience?? Next time, have a list.  But we would definitely do it again.
     Since then we have been preparing for Christmas and recovering from the weekend.  We got our tree and put it up in the living room.  We also discovered that when I left CA I left my tree stand, my Christmas lights, the garland, the tree skirt and the tree topper there.  So we bought new lights, thank goodness Michael's had a sale, a tree stand, skirt and topper.  We may just borrow some exterior lights and garland from friends.  But other wise, that is all for now.