Thanksgiving tree

This weekend was full of ups and downs and lefts and rights and a bunch of circles and squiggles.  First, I decided that Sunday would be a great time to go do all my Thanksgiving shopping….along with the rest of the world!  Man!  I think I got stepped on and pushed more times than I can remember!!  Not really…in reality…the most I saw people giving were a few eye rolls…but in the spirit of the season I feel like there were more “Excuse me’s” and “Thank yous” and “I’m so sorry…That’s ok” than I’ve ever heard before in my life.  Would have been a good lesson for the littles.

Second, in order to get a jumpstart on things, I decided to set my table early!  Wahoo!  It’s so cute!  I’m not going to show you the whole table yet, but as I was pondering what to do, I couldn’t help but feel like something was lacking.  Something big. So…I made something big!

So you can kinda see my here…but I had to show the scale of the “tree.”  I’ve pinned a bunch of things like this for displaying Christmas cards, but I thought this would be a perfect way to share what we’ve all been thankful for this year.  I basically went out at 9:00 at night and took clipping from different bushes and trees in my yard and just found what worked.  I filled the bottom of the vase (actually a candle holder) with some hazelnuts I picked up at the grocery store during my Turkey day food romp (didn’t have a plan for them…but knew I would use them for display somehow), and used my Cricut to make little tags to write on.  The genius cheapy part of this, besides the free yard clippings, was the string used to hang the tags is actually from the burlap placemats I made.  I frayed them a little, and kept the scraps and TA DA!  Free fun string to use however.

Hunter is really getting a kick out of the whole “what we are thankful for” thing.  He doesn’t TOTALLY get it, but I decided I’m going to write down whatever they say regardless.  Today Hunter said “Jagger”…which just made my heart melt, and Jagger was much more creative and said “Paper and crayon.”  He’s like Brick from Anchorman…I love lamp. 

I thought it would be fun for others who stop by our house to also partake in our little Thanksgiving tree, so I put extra tags and string in a cute little cup on the table.  BTW, that hobnail milk glass vase was 25 cents and Goodwill…gotta love the half price red tag days.  So cute!

I’m hoping to keep this transition alive…and maybe hang my favorites from previous years on the next years trees.  It’s a great way to log how your year has gone, and to remember all the things that are GOOD that happened in your life and not to focus on the bad.