Saturday, May 14, 2011

Family Practice in Thanksgiving

I have been reading One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.  I highly recommend the book.  She has been learning how thanksgiving really brings joy.  She shares how even being thankful for the hard stuff can bring joy too, even though it's extremely hard to do.  I love her perspective on letting go and just really being there in the moment and fully enjoying each moment. 
As I was trying to take a nap today after watching the movie Soul Surfer, which I also highly recommend, I remembered a blog post that I had read back in November.  It was close to Thanksgiving and the blogger, another adoptive momma, posted about how each year, they have a thanksgiving tree, and each day, each member of the family writes something they are thankful for on a leaf, and they put it up on the tree.  So, I start thinking, we could make a tree out of brown construction paper, put it up on a bulletin board and then every day pin our thank you's up on the tree.  In the winter months we could do snowflakes and pinecones, in spring and summer we could do green leaves and different colored flowers and then in the fall, do fall colored leaves.  Each day at dinner time, each family member can write on their snowflake or flower depending on the season what they are thankful for in the categories of a person, a memory and/or a material posession.  We could just write one or all three.  How fun it would be each month to look at our tree full of the things we are thankful for.  At the end of each month, we can take all of our leaves/snowflakes/flowers down and put them in a ziplock baggie marked w/ the month and year.  Then we can save them and look back when we are feeling down, or just need a little something to remind us how completely blessed we are. 
Now I just need to find some inexpensive, but easy way to make tons of leaves, snowflakes, pinecones and flowers on construction paper so I don't have to cut each shape out individually.  I am completely looking forward to our new practice in being thankful.