Busy finalizing your Thanksgiving grocery list? Before you head to the store, take another look in your pantry to see if there are any items that you can eliminate from your list. Poultry seasoning, pumpkin pie spice and pie crust are just a few of the many things that you can whip up from basic pantry staples:

• Thanksgiving Ingredients You Can Make

Frugal Thanksgiving Recipes:

• Cranberry Sauce
• How to Make Pumpkin Puree
• No-Fail Yeast Rolls

Photo © Flickr user PinkMoose

Playing in the snow is fun, but do you know what's really fun? Painting snow. Put together a snow paint kit for each of the kids on your holiday gift list, and you're sure to be one popular frugalite:

• How to Make Snow Paint

More Homemade Gifts for Kids:

• A Snowman Kit
• Homemade Crayons
• Still More Homemade Gifts for Kids

Name:

Bev from Kansas

Forum Membername:

mammahop

Your Favorite Source for Bargains:

Thrift shops, consignment sales and garage sales

Your Best Bargain of All Times:

It's a toss up between a $100 Chevrolet Caprice and our corn stove. The car is used as a work car, but only had 57,000 original miles on it. It gets 18 miles to the gallon, and if need be, could be used as a family car. The corn stove was $1500, and we used $450 worth of corn the first year. We also have a wood stove, but we would have still needed a tank of propane a month. If we had used propane, it would have cost us $2800 a winter to heat the house. Now all we need is to purchase corn every year. The wood is free - it just costs our time.

View the rest of Bev's profile

Sometimes the best gifts are the ones that hardly cost anything at all. Take pine cone fire starters for example: there's nothing particularly fancy about them, and yet they manage to be both beautiful and functional.

Take a walk this week to collect pine cones. Then, make some fire starters to give to your friends and family:

• How to Make Pine Cone Fire Starters

Photo © Flickr user TeoJPG