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Tips to Help Make Your Thanksgiving Go Smoothly This Year

<a href="https://pixabay.com/users/nutmarketca/">nutmarketca</a> / Pixabay

By Sarah Saker

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and it’s looking like you’re going to be hosting it this year. Hosting such an occasion can be a huge honor, and a huge headache, all at the same time. For many years, you’ve been the one who travels to other family members house for this festive occasion, but as time goes on, our loved ones who would normally host Thanksgiving, have either gotten too old to do it, or have passed on, so you’re next up on the list.

You are definitely excited to host, but are nervous because there are so many things to consider. You want everything to be perfect. You want your home to be warm and inviting, you want the food to be good, and you want to be a good host. Well, in order for that to happen, there are a few things you need to consider, and you may want to even make yourself a checklist.

When it comes to hosting any type of dinner, whether it’s for a birthday, anniversary, or Christmas, it takes pre-planning. There is no way you would be able to pull of such occasions on short notice. Now there may be some “slim pickin’s” kind of folk who can, indeed, pull it off, but for the most part, it genuinely does take time to plan, depending on what types of food you’ll be serving.

Hosting your family’s Thanksgiving dinner is no easy task, but you can definitely make it go smoothly with proper preparation. Take a look at these Thanksgiving tips to make hosting Thanksgiving this year, a breeze.

Meal Prep Early

This is where you put the ease in Thanksgiving. Remember, everything is all about planning ahead. For your turkey, you’ll want to pull your turkey out three days in advance. Be sure to check your turkey’s packaging to determine how long you’ll need to cook it… it takes a very long time to cook your turkey and you want to make sure you’ve given it ample time cook all the way through, from the inside to the outside.

Any foods that you can cook ahead of time and freeze, do that… it will save you so much time. Some Thanksgiving favorites that you can cook ahead and freeze would be greens, gravy, rolls, sweet potatoes. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, and if you want to get ahead of the game, you can go on and cook these meals the Monday of Thanksgiving week, then freeze them. On Thanksgiving Day, you can pull those items out the freezer and simply warm them up!

It certainly feels good when Thanksgiving finally arrives and everyone is at your house eating and enjoying themselves. It’s even better when the whole meal preparation process went without a hitch. One way to tell that your Thanksgiving was a success, is when your guests start asking for your Thanksgiving secrets. This will be a decision that you will have to make on your own, whether or not you want to share, but either way you look at it, you can give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done.

Clean Up Your Home

Most families will have Thanksgiving dinner in their formal dining room. When I was a child, the children had our own little area to eat dinner. We would have little card tables set up in a different room so that the adults and older family members could sit in the dining room and have adult conversations, and drink wine.

So now that you’re hosting dinner, you not only want to clean up the formal dining area, but you’ll need to designate an area for the kids and clean that area as well (if there will be kids coming). The task of cleaning up is something you want to do well in advance, by at least two or three days, and make sure no one goes in there to dirty anything up! The actual day of Thanksgiving, you can just kind of do a sweep through to see if you need to do any small tidying up.

Cleaning up also does not just consist of cleaning up the dining area. You essentially want to clean up your entire home, but you want to make sure you clean up the dining room, living room, bathrooms, and make sure the outside of your home is just as presentable as the inside of your home. This includes sweeping the front porch, raking the yard, etc.

Make Your Home Festive

Thanksgiving is in the season of fall, and that means your decorations should consist of reds, oranges, and yellows, as well as pumpkins, candles, and cornucopias. Decorating might be the best part of Thanksgiving, outside of the food.

You definitely want to catch your guests eyes as soon as they get out of the car by directing their attention to your home. Two big outside decor must haves are festive door wreaths and door mats. You’d want them to be reflective of fall colors, and even say something that might say “give thanks,” or “family.” It also is festive to have pumpkins and cute scarecrows on your porch somewhere as well.

Upon entering your home, you want your guests to feel warm. Try placing some cinnamon scented candles along your fireplace mantel, bookshelf, or end table in your living room. You can have garland made of fall leaves going on the arm rail of your staircase, and even on your mantel. You can also have that as a table runner in the formal dining room.

Now keep in mind, you don’t want to have too much going on, on the dinner table, because you have to make sure there’s enough room to set the food on the table. Essentially, you want to have a nice table runner, and a really nice centerpiece. Lots of families will use pumpkins as centerpiece, or a large vase with fall flowers in it.

If you’re a decorative DIY’er, you can actually get really creative with your home decor. A great way to showcase your home decor creativity is by creating a DIY home decor blog. You can share all the different ways to decorate their homes, pumpkins, and dinner tables with the world.

A lot of the time, decorating things yourself are a lot cheaper than buying it in the store, and it’s literally super simple. It can be a matter of getting a couple cans of spray paint, a bottle of glue, and a few bottles of glitter…simple as that.