Has anyone ever had a cookie party? Where you bake a bunch of one kind and all get together so everyone gets some of a lot of different kinds of cookies?

I've heard about them, and I've always wanted to be a part of one, but I've never done it. If you have, is it as good as it sounds?

At least that's the message this year's round of Christmas commercials seem to be saying over and over again. I've seen so many jewelry ads that you'd think there was some sort of national decree that every woman must have a minimum of four carats worth of diamonds to be able to walk in public.

Don't like what your wife bought? Get yourself a luxury car!

Kids, don't forget that unless your folks buy high-end electronics, they are awful, mean people. But if they bring home a gift for you wrapped in the blue and yellow of your local electronics store they can redeem themselves.

Call me a grinch all day long, but I'm completely turned off by the way Christmas is being marketed this year. It really seems like it's worse than ever.

Or is it just in my head?

I saw that A Charlie Brown Christmas is supposed to be on tonight, so i started thinking about all of the shows that come on this time of the year.

I still can't get past the holidays without watching "A Christmas Story" at least once. And "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" has some truly great moments.

On TV, I was always a sucker for "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". As a little kid I cried when he was mean to the little dog, Max. As an adult, my DH can sing the grinch song in the same register as the show, and that's always fun. But I also had a fondness for Rudolph. I that that stop-motion stuff was the coolest ever.

Any holiday entertainment preferences you want to share?

Did everyone have a good Thanksgiving?

After spending several hours in the kitchen, I have to say that the end result was much. I received mucho compliments about the meal (it's rumored that I'm a pretty good cook) and the day was pretty mellow. What more can a cat ask for?

How was your holiday?

Since the big feed is in just a couple of days, what's the one food you are already thinking about? The thing you don't seem to get any time except when a holiday rolls around?

In my case, it would be my uber-nummy potatoes au gratin. They just take too long to make for most of the year, but as long as I'm going to be standing in the kitchen for most of the day anyway, there's no time like now to get them on the table.

How about you?

So, I've got a few people coming over for Thanksgiving. Since I'm a working kitty, I won't be doing any cooking or cleaning during the day leading up to the big event, which means the nights are starting to look a little crowded this week.

My father in law is joining us, and since he won't drive when it's dark (and he won't let us pick him up and take him home) the meal needs to be ready by 2:30 p.m. or so, so he can be back on the road by no later than 4 p.m.

After buying all of the ingredients for the meal, and figuring out how much prep time I'm going to need for each dish, plus time to do the little things, like shower and brush out my hair, it looks like I'll need to be up by 6 a.m. or so, get in the kitchen by 8 a.m., serve at 2:30 p.m., and pack the "to-go" items for FIL at around 4:00 p.m.

This is a holiday??

Don't get me wrong (because someone always seems to "get" someone wrong), I'm happy to have the day off and everything, but until they replace football with the George Clooney/Johnny Depp film marathon it's still going to seem like us gals got the short of the stick on this one.

I was watching TV last night and saw a commercial for the Playstation 3 gaming system. In the ad it was advertised for $399. My first thought was "Wow."

Then it hit me. People are actually planning to spend $399 for a game system. For their kids. For Christmas. No matter how I looked at it, that seems like an awfully big-ticket purchase for a holiday gift. Then, of course, I thought of all of you and thought, who better to ask than this eclectic group of people?

What was the biggest-ticket item you bought for your kids, for Christmas or a birthday? I'm not counting those parents who buy cars for college graduation.

And, what was the biggest-ticket item your parents ever bought for you? In my family I don't think my parents ever spent $100 on a single gift item, let alone the amount of the game systems now.  I'm straining my brain to remember the most expensive gift I ever got. It was probably the purple suede fringed jacket I got one year for Christmas...and I thought it was way cool :o)

A few months ago, my DH and I did something that a couple of years ago would have seemed unthinkable. We bought a bunch of those CFL light bulbs. We replaced the bulbs in our living room, the bedrooms and the music room. They even make the bulbs that go in 3-way lamps, for low, medium and high light. And you know what? The light from CFL bulbs really isn't any different than the light from regular bulbs.

Next, it was time to replace the soap in the bathrooms and, as luck would have it, there was a new soap brand on the market that is more environmentally friendly. So we bought it. And our hands get just as clean.

With each change we started to get a little bolder. When we needed more dishwasher detergent, we reached for the "greener" version without even wondering whether or not it would work. Of course it did.

It's like a cool, grown-up treasure hunt.

Anyone else out there hunting for the green?

So, the poll topic got me thinking. I'm not very traditional when it comes to Thanksgiving. In fact, my family joked last year that they didn't think that I had ever cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving, and they are probably right.

In keeping with that spirit, I shall probably not make a turkey this year, either. But I am a little stumped about what might be good to have instead of the traditional bird.

Anyone out there have any suggestions? I'm always willing to take suggestions on side dishes, too.

I'm pretty sure I asked this before, but with all of the new faces here these days I thought I would throw it out there again.

Anyone out there a collector? Turns out that I actually have two collections.

The first collection is of cat figurines. Plastic cats, wood cats, porcelain cats, crystal cats, metal cats...at this point it might be hard to find a cat in a medium where I don't have at least one example.

I don't collect them on purpose. People started giving them to me as gifts. I have a set of cats that I received as a birthday gift when I was nine, right up to a cat that I got a few weeks ago because my mom saw it, "and knew you'd love it."

And, to be honest, in a way, I do. I love looking at them and remembering who gave them to me and what was happening in my life at that time. I like that now that I have well over 100 of the little guys, they make for a really cool display in our china hutch...and they get a lot more comments than the china ever did. It's fun when people who visit once or twice a year peek inside and see that they've been moved around, or try and pick out the new ones that have arrived since their last visit.

And, I'm a cat junkie. At least these cats don't shed and aren't costing me an arm and a leg in food bills.

My other collection is purely me, since I can't bribe anyone else into getting them for me.

I collect old dog license tags. I try to stay pre-1950 or so, but if there's one in a really cool shape or has some other personal significance to me, I'll drop the cash.

Thus far this is a relatively small collection of a couple of dozen licenses. Partly because  I zone in and out of eBay, where I tend to buy them, and partly because the supply sort of comes and goes. Some weeks there are tons of cool tags out there, other weeks, not so much. And some weeks I'm more willing to part with the cash to buy them than other weeks, too. It's a weird little world of collectors, so cool tags can end up in a sort of feeding frenzy at the end of an auction with the same four people in a perpetual bidding war.

My favorite tag is one from Port Elizabeth, Africa, dated 1898.

I'd love to collect vintage dog collars, but those are way too pricey for this working girl's blood.

So, there's my story...how about yours?