But do not spend more money than you need to in order to enjoy the holiday. Plan ahead and you can keep out-of-pocket costs down as much as possible.

Here are some of the expenses to consider beyond the turkey:

• Don’t get nickeled and dimed on airport travel: If there are relatives or friends who can drop you off and pick you up, avoid parking at the airport and use the flight tracker sites and cell phones to make your transportation connections. I’ve needed to use an airport parking garage only once since Detroit Metropolitan Airport set up its cell phone parking lots. It cost me $10 to park the car for my passenger on that occasion. But the cell phone parking lot usage is free. You also know, of course, to limit your baggage to carry-ons as much as possible. If you are traveling with someone, share a checked bag so you do not have to pay so much in luggage fees.
• Look up the best options for toll road fees. If you are traveling from the Detroit area to cities near Cleveland or Chicago on Thanksgiving weekend, be aware that the Ohio Turnpike raised its cash rates on Oct. 1. The turnpike also started accepting an electronic transponder system for toll payment on that date. If you have an EZPass transponder, or a transponder from another toll road that is accepted on the Ohio Turnpike, then use it for your holiday travel.  Go to the turnpike site for the details. You also want to map out the difference in tolls and drive time if you got off the turnpike one or two exits early. Sometimes you have to use the exit you’ve always taken, but sometimes another route is possible.
• Gas prices can be planned around. You know where the gas gouger stations are on your regular travel routes. But if you are traveling in new territory, check the Gas Buddy site to help plan out the best fuel stops en route to, or in, the city you will be spending your holiday weekend in. This won’t help when overall gas prices go up or down – I’m talking about knowing whether one exit or city is better than the nearby options. You also want to travel in the most fuel efficient (usually the smallest) vehicle that holds all your family members. Remember – you’re not hauling all of the family’s sports equipment to go to Grandma’s house for dinner.
• Don’t go crazy with the Thanksgiving menu. You know which foods your family will insist on for Thanksgiving – and if you aren’t certain, ask! Then make your shopping list and buy the groceries when you see the sales announced. Do not make any food that is so far down the “must have” list for Thanksgiving that it will not be eaten that day or soon afterward. You also want plenty of plastic tubs, wraps and foils on hand so to repackage leftovers. That refrigerator can hold only so many serving bowls – and leftovers will go to waste if you do not properly handle them quickly.
• Table settings can be multi-holiday. It’s possible to buy dishes and linens with a Thanksgiving theme. If you do buy them, then stock up during sales instead of paying full price. However, it is more frugal to get multiple uses during the year for your good dishes and table linens. Colors of harvest gold and orange work just as well for Halloween; and colors of cranberry and forest green work just as well for Christmas. White table settings go with any holiday. Put the Thanskgiving theme in with just a couple of accessories or maybe a tablecloth changed out.
• Look for the sales on cooking and entertaining gadgets. If something you could use in the kitchen to help with Thanskgiving dinner preparations is also useful during another time of year, consider making that purchase while the Thanksgiving promotions are in effect. This may be your best time of year to buy items such as folding tables and chairs, cookie sheets, slow cookers, coffee pots, roasters and mixers.
• Stick with frugal family entertainment. You don’t need to buy or rent a stack of DVDs for your visitors. There will be football games and holiday movies on TV, and the movie-lovers might want to go to the cinema to see the newest shows anyway.  When the guests arrive, bring out the playing cards, board games and whatever kids’ movies you already own.
• Don’t pretend your home is a luxury hotel. I know that the suggestions for hospitality these days include stocking a guest bedroom with snacks, magazines and floral arrangements; and placing pretty soaps and towels in the bathroom. The fact is: if you are hosting out-of-town guests who expect hotel-style accommodations, then direct them to the nearest hotel. Families on a budget are permitted to provide their overnight guests with an air mattress on the floor, or a hide-a-bed sofa, with clean and good condition pillows, sheets and blankets; and are allowed to expect their guests to share a bathroom with the family members.

Apparently, a lot of you felt the same way. Ira just sent me a link to a recent retail study that showed consumers who were surveyed in late November and early December were spending their “savings” from lower gas bills at the grocery store.

Groceries are the top item on which U.S. consumers are spending their savings from lower gas prices, ahead of putting the money in savings, holiday gift buying and paying off credit cards, according to the results of nationwide research from retail analytics firm Precima. …

The gas-to-groceries switch is even higher in certain key sectors. Among those survey respondents who said they’ve suffered a direct financial loss during the recession, 55% said they’re spending gas savings on groceries, and for those whose annual income is under $35,000 the number is 59%.

However, there are ways you can deal with that cost! Grocery bills are one of the fastest returns on investment if you are needing to cut household expenses. Check out the ideas on my grocery sidebar.

This is a very cool site for those of you who need to, or have decided to, cook from home more often.

Supercook is a free recipe search engine. It’s funded by advertisers who like to market to foodies. After you register, you type ingredients that you have in your home and the site will recommend possibilities.

I typed in tortillas, cinnamon, onion and peas to start with, and I get this message “You can make 1 recipe right now! You have everything needed for this recipe!”

The result: Cinnamon Chips from the Cooking Light magazine.

Well, to be fair, I have corn tortillas, not flour tortillas, at home. But the database wasn’t that specific.

I start adding in more ingredients (a little awkward, because I’m blogging from the office right now and can’t just open up a pantry door) and more suggestions pop up such as Sweet Potatoes for Two, Fruit Pie Crumb Topping, Caramel Icing, …

This is a seriously cool web site. I’m going to play around some more with it when I get home.

No, this site won’t replace my cookbooks and recipe box. It will, however, help me use the most of what I’ve currently got in the pantry and freezer.

CNN has this report – Uh-oh: Gas prices on the rise.

A snippet:

On Friday, Jason Toews, co-founder of GasBuddy in Minneapolis, warned that gas prices may be bottoming out.

Lower gas prices are starting to spur demand in many areas, which could mean gas prices will pop back up again when the spring and summer driving season hits next year, according to Toews.

“Enjoy the gas prices while they’re here,” he said.

While I haven’t found much to celebrate about the falling gas prices because of other economic chaos of the past few weeks, the fact is families on a budget may want to start thinking about opportunities that have been on the back burner for awhile.

Here’s why: Most of the gas expenses in your household are related to the daily work commute – not your social or shopping drives.

I’ve been tracking our household expenses on computer since 1996. I am missing some data because of a computer hard drive crash a few months ago. But it is obvious that, over the years, that my family’s gas expenses went up when either my husband or I had a daily work commute out of town, and down when we both worked close to where we live.

In fact, the monthly expenses was so tied into the daily miles driven that I couldn’t  determine the impact of rising gas prices when I did try to crunch those statistics.

The problem is: if you’ve got to cut back on gas expenses – the social and shopping trips are what drop off. If carpooling to work out-of-town was THAT easy for Monroe residents, we’d all have been doing that all along.

Well, the lower prices have been in effect for long enough that you should be noticing a little bit less pain at the pump.

Maybe you can start looking at road trips that have nothing to do with work:

• When’s the last time you took the kids to the zoo?
• When’s the last time you visited one of the museums in the metro areas?
• When’s the last time you went to your favorite specialty or independent stores in Ann Arbor, Novi or Perrysburg?
• When’s the last time you had lunch with the friend who lives an hour away?
• When’s the last time you did a “stock up” run at store that doesn’t exist in your neighborhood?

It’s not going to cost as much to make those drives as it did this summer.

Break out of your cabin fever for a day, and make a road trip you haven’t done for awhile.

A snippet:

On your way out the door, fill a thermos with soup and pack a sandwich and a piece of fruit or a granola bar for your child. This can provide a nice energy boost when your child needs it. One way to make this easier is to prepare serving-size freezer bags of soup in advance – just make a large batch of soup, fill up some small bags with enough soup for a good serving, then freeze the bag. When you need it, just unfreeze it, warm it up, and drop it in a thermos.

When my daughter was in Girl Scouts, her honor guard and camp staff meetings were all over southeast Michigan.

So I learned to bundle up those trips with shopping trips to stores and other errands I wanted to run out of town – such as going to the really big Jo-Ann Fabric store in Ypsilanti while my daughter was attending a meeting in Ann Arbor.

A snippet:

The Labor Department said Wednesday that consumer prices fell by 1% last month, the biggest one-month decline on records that go back to February 1947. The drop was twice as large as the 0.5% decrease that analysts had been expecting and marked the third straight month that prices had fallen or been unchanged.

The underlying cause is the dramatic drop in gas prices.

Michigan Gas Prices is posting price ranges of $2.01 to $2.14 for the Monroe area, but some of those prices are from Thursday night.

Yes, I did notice when I put gas in the car Wednesday that the price had dropped significantly.

Celebrate if you want.

But I won’t be traveling out of town any more frequently than I have been in recent months. And the high gas prices lasted so long that the resulting financial chaos won’t be resolved quickly.

The MonroeTalkers are chatting about “Oil prices drop, but the high prices remain the same.”

A snippet:

“We are seeing ridership with a steady increase,” said Mark Jagodzinski, general manager of Lake Erie Transit. “Systemwide, we’ve seen a 4 percent increase over the past two months. The fixed-route system increase is actually 7 percent over two months.

“A 7 percent increase in just two months is substantial. Our history has been a steady ridership with a little increase or little decrease.”

A sidebar explains a petition that has started to route the buses into Carleton and Ash Township.

Yes, the bus fare recently increased to $1 each way. But if someone in your family can use the bus to get to school, work, or to other daily errands, that’s potentially one less car you need to own, pay insurance on and maintain.