Thanksgiving and Christmas Tips

A few links to my favorite Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday posts from this week last year:

Info on how to cut your own Christmas tree from national forest land:
Cheap Christmas Trees = a wonderful tradition

A few easy ideas:

Trouble with that Christmas list?

A planning checklist:
Hosting the Thanksgiving meal?

New to Holiday Haven?
See:The Holiday Challenge.
 Holiday Haven's home page

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

From my family to you and yours.

The Holiday Challenge

October 30th is National Candy Corn Day!

Today is National Candy Corn Day! If you need an excuse to eat candy before Halloween, here it is! 

Fun little facts:

 This candy has been around since 1880.

They are about 3 times the size of a actual kernel of corn, 

12 pieces is about 70 calories, 

At other times of the year the color of the candy is made suit other holidays such as Christmas and Easter.

If the kernels sold per year were laid end to end they would go around the earth 4.25 times.

Fun little facts were gathered from wikipedia.

Pumpkin Carving Tips

It is almost that time! Pumpkin carvin' time!

 Some tips: 

After you carve your pumpkin wash them out to remove bacteria and help them to keep longer. 

You can also take a small amount of veggie oil and rub it on the cut edges to help seal them. 

If you bought a pie pumpkin you can use it for pumpkin pie after you are done using it as a jack-o-lantern.

We make roasted pumpkins seeds from the jack-o-lantern seeds each year you can find my recipe here: Roasted Pumpkin Seeds {recipe}

And this year I made up some free pumpkin carving printables see them here: Free Pumpkin Carving Printables

 (photos are from morguefiles.com, which is an amazing site!)

 

October 28th is Wild Foods Day

This is a holiday for everyone from gourmet cooks to whole food lovers, homesteaders, health nuts and environmentalists. Today is a day to celebrate, seek out and find, or even just learn a little about the wild foods that grow in your area. Wild foods are great nutrition and green, (as long as they are not in an area where pesticides/fungicides etc. are sprayed). I love that eating wild help us to understand the world and seasons around us. Each year I harvest apples, and huckleberries, and can jelly from the blackberries that grow wild in my yard. This unofficial holiday appears (according to my research google search) to have been started by wild life forests and parks as a day to educate people on how to find food in the wild.

(Today is also National Chocolate Day, Plush Animal Lover's Day, St. Jude's Day and Day of International Concern About Young People and Gun Violence. See these and more at LisaLovesHolidays.Blogspot.com)

Halloween Tablescape

A spooky table for Halloween. Black and white plates with a black napkin tucked around the dinner plate. Paper bat clinging to the edges.

Spiders and cobwebs on the glasses.

A haunted birdhouse mansion.

Appetizers anyone?

Twigs and spiderwebs.

Pumpkin Chili

I wanted to share one of our Halloween traditions: Every year I buy one extra pumpkin to be hollowed out. I fill it with precooked chili, take the top rack out of the oven and bake the chili in the pumpkin for about 45 minutes or until the chili is hot. It gives the chili a slight pumpkin flavor. And its a warm meal before going out into the cold air to trick or treat, plus it makes the house smell of pumpkin, and starts everyone out on stomachs full of hearty food before they are tempted with all of that candy!

Pumpkin Pizza

Fun little twist on a pizza:

To make roll out your dough as usual, you probably could even use a premade crust and cut it down to size.

Add a stem.

Top as you would a regular pizza.

Slice an orange bell pepper into strips.

Add cheddar cheese and bell pepper strips.

Curl dough to add to the stem. (You could also add a leaf).

Bake according to your crusts recipe.

And enjoy your fun pizza!

It's a Pumpkin Party!

Today I am joining Beth's wonderful Pumpkin Party. Below I have put together some of my favorite pumpkin crafts and decor from this year for her party.

Click the links under the photos to see more about them.

Mini Pumpkin Jack-o-Lantern Candles

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds {recipe}

Pumpkin Napkin Fold {Tutorial}

Pumpkins from twigs {Tutorial}

Elegant White Pumpkin Tablescape

My Free Pumpkin Carving Printables

and a Pumpkin Pizza.

Happy PUMPKIN season!!
And thanks Beth for hosting such a fun party.

Candy and Costume Tips

Two featured posts I am sharing from this week last year:

Candy tips: how to avoid eating it all and a health tip every parent should know.

Quick costume ideas from materials you probably already have on hand.

Decorating for Halloween {From my Calendar}

This weekend we decorate for halloween.  We keep the celebration simple around my house.

 Are you ready to see my home all decked out?

OK...

Here
        it
           is...

Ta Da!

Please don't mind the cobwebs.

And I know, I know, we live in a haunted mansion.

Now... don't be jealous, you should have seen it when we bought it! It had things growing in it.

We have done a lot of work to make it feel light and airy. See that is me there on the right (you can tell cause I am shorter) and my hubby is on the left. 

See our cat snowball, there in the middle? And our three little pumpkins?

Alright, enough kidding. (Before you all think I have lost my mind).

If you are following along with my  holiday challenge, this is the weekend I make sure that we are ready for halloween. I do not do much just small touches: A bat, a spider, a tablescape, cobwebs always are a 'must'. I wait till a week before the holiday to decorate and use it as a time to double check that we are completely set and ready to go. Somehow decorating for the holiday puts me in just the right mood.

(here is a photo from inside our REAL house)

Happy decorating!

Free Pumpkin Carving Printables

For fun I made up these free printable pumpkin carving stencils. I am no expert so you will see they are not perfect, but I had a lot of fun with them and hope you will too!

 To print click on the image to enlarge. Click again to make sure the image is fully expanded and then select 'file' and 'print' from the top of your browsers window. If you have trouble try changing options under the page setup option under the file tab. Or, save to your computer and print as you normally would or through the paint program. (Personal use only).