Enjoying the Gratitude Tree

A few years ago we made a small gratitude tree as a centerpiece on the dining room table just before Thanksgiving.  You can read about it here.  It was such a resounding success, I knew I wanted to do it again.  Last year we were gone at Thanksgiving, and the opportunity to have a thankful tree was lost in  the craziness of traveling.  This year, I had two goals:  get the tree up at the beginning of November to fully celebrate the Thanksgiving season (probably my favorite holiday), and figure out a way to make the tree bigger and more stable.  The tree we made a few years ago was always toppling over, and because so much happens on our dining room table (eating, homework, games, the sorting of paper work and mail and stuff) a large centerpiece is not very practical for our family.  I also knew we were going to need a bigger tree this year because it would be up for a longer period of time, and we would need more room to hang the tags.

The first day of November I went looking in our yard under the pine tree for a few large branches.  Dr. Peds always piles the branches he trims off in the summer there to dry until he throws them into the outside fireplace when we are having a fire.  I found a very large branch from a juniper tree that he sadly had to cut down because it was so damaged from the heavy snows we had last year.  I dug out the galvanized bucket that I put one of our Christmas trees in last year, and plopped the branch in there.  It is still kind of unstable, but I hooked it up to the window and so far it has stayed standing for the most part.

I hoped that each person in the family would be on board with writing one tag to put on the tree each day:  one thing that they are thankful for documented.  It turns out that most of the kidlets are totally on board with this project, particularly the youngest ones, and they have churned out so many tags that I ran out of the cute, special tags that I purchased within a week.  I hastily made a stack of not quite so fancy tags that do the job just fine, and the tree gets more interesting each day.  It’s so fun to see what things make it up on the tree, and I love the act of pausing just for a moment to mindfully write what I’m grateful for, too.  I love that my younger kidlets think of things they want to write down without any prompting from me, and they actually come and ask if they can put their ideas up on the tree.