Happy Thanksgiving from Fox Nation!

Last-Minute Thanksgiving Dinner Checklist

By Adam Verwymeren

Published November 23, 2011| FoxNews.com

Whether you’re hosting for the first time or a seasoned pro, getting a Thanksgiving meal on the table can be a daunting task. Between the turkey, side dishes and visiting family members, a lot needs to be handled in a short time. So before the big day arrives tomorrow, here’s a quick to-do list to ensure you have everything in order.

It’s All About the Bird

First, and most important, you need to thaw your turkey. Too many people wake up on Thanksgiving Day with a rock-hard bird, forcing them to resort to potentially dangerous thawing methods, like running hot water over it. To thaw a turkey in the fridge, Butterball recommends 24 hours for every 4 pounds of turkey. If you need to hasten your bird’s unfreezing, run cold water over it in the sink, or put it in a cooler full of cold water, which will thaw an average turkey in about six hours.

Avoid yet another “uh-oh” moment by making sure your turkey fits your roasting pan. Many people overestimate the size of their cookware, only to realize far too late that they don’t have anything to cook the main dish in.

If you’re deep frying your turkey, make sure you have plenty of fresh cooking oil and a full tank of gas. You don’t want your dinner to get derailed by rancid oil or an empty propane tank

READ THE FULL CHECKLIST HERE

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10 Tools to Help You Survive Thanksgiving

By Adam Verwymeren

Published November 16, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Thanksgiving is a time for family, food, and, of course, stress. Lots and lots of stress. If you’d like to make this year’s event a little more worry free, check out these 10 tools that will help you get dinner on the table quickly and deal with visiting relatives.

Masterbuilt Deep Fryer

There are few things as delicious as a deep-fried turkey. But deep frying is dangerous work, involving vast amounts of flammable fat that, if not handled correctly, can lead to disaster. To play it safe, most people fry their bird out on the lawn or driveway, which can be downright miserable on a frigid November day. Masterbuilt’s indoor deep fryer ($120) seeks to solve this problem by making a safer, more compact deep fryer. The Masterbuilt can put a mouth-watering 14-pound bird on the table in about an hour.

READ THE LIST HERE

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How to Keep Your Thanksgiving Budget Thankfully Low

Written by Sarah Gilbert

We're all skilled in the ways of the holiday budget; most of us start thinking about it in the fall, with most attention paid to Christmas gifts, feasting, and New Years' celebrations. And if we're traveling to visit family and friends for Thanksgiving, that budgeting has already occurred. But few of us give much thought to a Thanksgiving budget. (This is born out by the few responses to our Facebook post about saving money on Thanksgiving; Taco Bell isn't exactly a “strategy”!)

Estimates of spending for Thanksgiving are slim
Unlike Halloween and Christmas, the retail groups generally don't produce a spending estimate for Thanksgiving; all energies are focused on Black Friday and every Saturday-Sunday-Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday of shopping days after that. Instead, we have an agricultural estimate of costs of a Thanksgiving dinner that is something like the 12 Days of Christmas price tag; more a measure of inflation than a gauge of what people are actually doing. (For the record, the prices are up big this year for a 10-person feast, at $49.20 from $43.47 in 2010.)

As such, the Thanksgiving price tag seems an amazing bargain. At less than $5 a person for the meal, could we really be skating into the holiday shopping season with only a $20 dent in our budget for a family of four (less travel costs, of course)? If this were true, would charity organizations be so keen to get our cans and cartons of food for their Thanksgiving boxes?

I suspect that the real costs of Thanksgiving are far more than these soundbite-sized news bits reveal; and that it's a holiday for which many of us fail to plan financially.

READ THE FULL STORY AT FOX BUSINESS

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'All-American' Thanksgiving Meal