Thanksgiving, A Time for Family.

The days of eating dinner around the dining room table are long gone. I remember eating each meal at home with the whole family -- breakfast, lunch and dinner. We've now replaced home cooked meals with fast-food and car seats. Prepared foods are also very popular. Just visit your local supermarket, and it will look more like a smorgasbord than a grocery store. Then the forth Thursday of November comes along and everything changes. Families start to gather in what becomes the biggest home cooked meal of the year. But why? Let's first take a look at the history behind thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Day, presently celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, has been an annual tradition in the United States since 1863. It did not become a federal holiday until 1941. Thanksgiving was historically a religious observation to give thanks to God, and is still celebrated as such by many families, but it is now also considered a secular holiday as well.

Source: Wikipedia. License Terms

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A Craving For Chocolate Cake

I've been making my homemade chocolate cake for about two years now. I have perfected the recipe and you will think it's the best chocolate cake ever. So if you're craving chocolate cake during your pregnancy, this is the recipe for you.

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
2 cups sugar
1 cup apple sauce
1 cup hot coffee
1 cup 2% milk
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla

Sift dry ingredients in large bowl. Add apple sause, coffee and milk. Mix at medium speed for 2 minutes. Add eggs and vanilla, beat 2 more minutes. (Batter will be a little thin.) Grease and flour a 9x13 inch pan and bake at 325 for 45 to 60 minutes. Test with toothpick until it comes out of center of cake clean.

For a great icing combine 1 cup of crisco and 1 cup sugar and mix until fluffy (About 15 minutes). Set aside. Over medium heat, combine 1/2 cup milk and 2 TBsp. of flour. (Hint, mix the 2 TBsp. of flour with a little milk, mix and add to remaining milk). Cook milk mixture until thickened (stirring constantly). Let Cool. Add milk mixture and 1 tsp. of vanilla extract to sugar mixture and blend for another 15 minutes. We call it Twinkle Icing.

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25 Days of Christmas

My wife and I came up with a great idea for the evenings leading up to Christmas. Our idea was to do something special (movies, popcorn and more) with the kids every night starting on December 1st and ending on Christmas Night. Our kids love movies and every Friday we have movie night in our house. We thought since the kids look forward to movie night every Friday, they may love this idea. And they did! The idea got a thumbs-up from our three kids. We chose 22 movies from 1935 to 2007. That leaves three more evenings. We plan on going to see a musical/play, we're thinking "A Musical Christmas Carol". We also will be reading the book, "Twas the night before Christmas". And on Christmas Night we will be watching our video from Christmas morning. This has been our tradition for years. Select "Read More" to see our list.

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Will your baby have red hair?

Before I hand things over to the Expert, I have a some personal experience with this topic. My wife has red hair, and I have brown hair with some facial red hair, so what are the chances that are kids would have red hair. Would the chances be 30% or 50%, what if I told you 100%. All three of my children have red hair. Our oldest, our daughter has Auburn hair, our oldest son has dark red hair and our youngest son has strawberry-blonde hair. Even though there are statistics that you can go by, I'm convinced that you can never count on it being a perfect system.

As far as eye color, the two older kids ended up with hazel eyes and the youngest has green-hazel eyes. My wife has green eyes and I have hazel eyes. Now for the Expert...

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Baby Naming Books

We put together some of the most popular baby naming books available for your convenience. This way you don't have to search yourself and spend valuable time trying to decide which books are the best. This is also a great way to search for baby names when a computer is not accessible.

We put together a list of 20 diverse baby naming books from Amazon. These books range from large lists to narrow lists, Irish to African American. Almost all these books are well priced. Please Enjoy! CLICK HERE

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