Hosting the Holidays

Last week I shared how I’m planning for the holidays, today I though I’d dive a little deeper in to hosting the holidays. Our holiday season is a little different this year than the past couple since we’ll be with my husband’s family in Arizona for 2 weeks at Christmas, so planning/hosting is slightly different too, but its all good!

 

Usually my parents and sister come over for both Thanksgiving & Christmas. Due to my dad being an over the road trucker sometimes we do have to delay the day we actually celebrate, but otherwise everything goes as normal. I try to plan out all the meals for a holiday weekend as much as possible and keep them simple so that we can maximize the time we spend together! I’ll count on my sister for breakfast, she is the BEST at breakfast, I just make sure we have the basics like eggs, milk, toast/bagel/english muffin and let her take care of the rest. For lunch I turn to a hodge podge of heavy appetizers hoping to have leftovers that we can actually pull out for the next day too! I figure we’ll usually eat out for one or two meals over the weekend as well. I’ll ask my mom to bring a couple appetizer type dishes for us to munch on and possibly a side for the actual holiday dinner.

 

I try not to go overboard with our holiday meal, since there are only 5 of us we don’t need a ton of food. Every year my husband smokes the turkey for Thanksgiving, I always make this corn at my sister’s request, we’ll have some green bean casserole and roasted veggies, of course a type of potato (my hubby’s FAVE side), and a type of bread rounds it out. We typically order a pie from a favorite local bakery too to make it even easier!