Thanksgiving, Gingerbread Houses and Beautiful Trees

The holiday season is the most wonderful time of the year! Our traditions continued this week. On Wednesday we went to the Botanical Gardens for the first time. We went to see the gingerbread houses they had on display. We took our camera for pictures of the houses we liked so we could use some of the ideas for our own gingerbread house. Then, we visited the beautiful indoor gardens. What a great place!

This week we spent quite a bit of time focusing on creating our gingerbread house. Logan figured out measurements and created blueprints from a picture of a house we found on the internet. We rolled out each piece and baked them over the course of the last two days. We had a great idea to use parchment paper this year so we didn't have to pick up the individual pieces to transfer them onto the baking sheet. We assembled the house tonight and will decorate tomorrow! We will post pictures soon.

Logan and I will always remember the Thanksgiving Holidays from Cleveland. This year we went again to the annual Thanksgiving get together with many good friends in the ward. Everyone bakes a few items and there is a smorgasbord of food, great company, and fun friends for Eva to play with. She had fun playing with Alta and Rhoda, and Logan ate more turkey than I have ever seen anyone eat. It was quite spectacular.

Of course we went shopping on Black Friday and we were able to finish up our Christmas shopping! We still have a few things to make, but all of the materials are purchased. That counts, right?

On Saturday we drove to Akron for a Christmas tree festival. This is an event that is held every year and all proceeds go to benefit a children's hospital. Individual donors or companies decorate trees, wreaths, or other Christmas decor and sell it for charity. There are also raffle tickets that you can purchase and place in front of an item (or group of items with a similar theme)in hopes of winning the raffle. These probably were worth between five hundred to a thousand dollars each. We had a great time and will definitely be back next year.

Next Friday we are flying to Utah for the whole month of December. We have a lot of things to finish up before we go. This week will be full of fun activity. We are very excited to see our families. Evelyn is pretty excited too!

This is at the Gingerbread display. Here, we received inspiration for this year's gingerbread house, marking this place as a sacred location.

After seeing all the gingerbread we went and explored the gardens. Evelyn didn't quite know what to make of a giant leaf that had fallen from one of the trees.

At the gardens, I found the angriest plant ever. It looks innocent enough at first (top), but underneath all the leaves it exposes its true nasty character.

Here's Rhoda and Evelyn playing their favorite game- "slap-the-chair"- at the ward Thanksgiving party.

Here's Rachel and Eva at the Christmas tree display in Akron.

Eva had her first encounter with the "Man from the North" at the Christmas tree display. I don't think she was too impressed.

This has nothing to do with our week, but I had to steal this picture off my sister's blog of my Grandma on the Harley she keeps hidden in her garage. Who would have known!