3 Week Thanksgiving

With money tight right now, I've been working hard with my family to have a purpose-driven holiday. Thanksgiving really gets skipped between Halloween and Christmas. So we are finding ways everyday for 3 weeks to celebrate. I was inspired by the story of Barbara Rainey from FamilyLife Today who talked about here devotion to helping her family celebrate, experience, and remember the purpose of Thanksgiving.

Here's a few things we are doing over the course of 21 days to celebrate Thanksgiving.

• Celebrate being thankful and grateful EVERY DAY in some way
• Read kids books with Thanksgiving theme - silly to historical
• Kindness garlands - I hung a string from our slider window. Everytime I see the boys showing an act of kindness or helpfulness - they chose an artificial leaf from a basket and we tie it to the string. What you end up with is a cascade of colorful leaves. Mine are above a floor vent so they can "move in the breeze."
  
• Coloring - using clipart that I removed color from to make themed coloring sheets.
• Some of those sheets were leaves and acorns that we colored and cut out to put on our windows and send to others.
  
• Cards - We turned a coloring sheet with leaves reading "Happy Thanksgiving" into cards to send to the grandparents. We tucked in some of the leaves/acorns we colored and cut out.
• Thankful Turkeys - We cut turkey shapes out of brown construction paper and made beaks, legs, and feathers for them. The feather we colored and then wrote on them the things we were thankful for. They were then cut out and glued to our turkeys.
• Pilgrims - read about their lives and hardships they faced, watch Charlie Brown's pilgrim movie (second story on the thanksgiving disc), color pictures, play "pretend" pilgrims
  
• Pilgrim hats - color pictures of a pilgrim hat, cut it out and staple to a band of construction paper to make a hat.
  
• Thankful dinner table - while we eat we go around the table and talk about all the things we are thankful from. We hear everything from "Jesus loving us and dying on the cross" to "my toys" to "my nice cozy bread" to "French fries!" Learning myself that we can be thankful for everything. I do melt when the mention their mom in their list.
  
• TIME - slowing down and being together. It's amazing how much easier it is to be a mom when I'm not planning, going, doing, and preparing. It's been an unexpected treat.

If you noticed. Not much of what is listed here costs much if any money. My printer cartridge is running low, but the rest is reusable or intangible. Overall I am much more clear of what I have to be thankful for this year. Silly me to think this was for the kids...