Thanksgiving Air Travel Push Begins [AUDIO]

With Thanksgiving only a couple of days away, the start of the holiday travel season is just about upon us.

Bearing that in mind, your friends at the Transportation Security Administration are out with some advice if you're traveling by plane in the next couple of months.

Lisa Farbstein, a Public Affairs Manager for the TSA, says there's a new screening procedure for kids 12 and under, "and what it does is it helps reduce - yet not eliminate - pat-downs of younger travelers- and so passengers who are 12 and under are also able to leave on things such as maybe their ball caps and their shoes when going through security checkpoints."

She points out another benefit for travelers is that privacy protection software has been added to those invasive x-ray scanner machines, so "instead of having a more revealing body image with somebody in a back room who's looking at that, this is more of a cookie-cutter outline…that's been really well received by the passengers."

Farbstein adds airline passengers should not travel with wrapped gifts in their carry-on luggage, because they all have to go through the x-ray machine, and "if it doesn't need a closer look, fine, but if it does- then somebody's going to have to unwrap it , and it's not going to be the person you intended it to be for…so if you're going to bring your gift, a gift-bag with nice tissue paper would be a much more efficient way to take that through an airport- okay?"

She also says snow-globes are a no-no because "we have no way of knowing how many ounces of liquid are in that snow-globe- so what we recommend that you do is you just back that in your checked luggage…remember,

if you can pump it, pour it, spill it, smear it, spread it, spray it or squeeze it, then it's considered a liquid or gel…which means you can't bring it with you."

Farbstein wants travelers to know they can get all of their questioned answered with the new My TSA app.

"It's a free downloadable application to your iPads or your smart phones" she says, "and if you're not sure where you should be packing that item, you can look it up."