Favorite Traditions

Don't you feel sometimes like it's just incredibly hard to feel grateful?  I mean, I KNOW that I live a charmed life.  My husband is kind and works hard at a good job.  My kids are healthy and I love them dearly.  I have a body that works well, a house that helps us stay warm, fantastic friends, and only first-world problems.  However, sometimes it seems like it's what I'm dissatisfied with that stares me in the face until I want to soak in a hot tub (see what I mean about first-world problems?) and shut my face to the world for an hour or two.  

This is my particular solution to that particular problem.  And yes, we just keep it up through the month of November.  But at least I'm counting my blessings every day during the month of November, so that's something, right?   For several years, we had a Thankful Jar on our dining table, which we each put a blessing into every night.  

However, last year, the girls and I stained this leftover piece of 2x6 with some poly-stain mix (which was also leftover from restaining the kitchen table).  We cut out the "give thanks" on my Cricut (but you could easily paint or stencil or even Sharpie the words you wanted), and put one nail up for each  member of the family.  The board is hung with two screw-eyes and a length of ribbon.  Then we cut out a bunch of tags and strung them with fall-colored embroidery floss.  (You can see the blank ones in the bowl sitting there on the piano.)

 Every night at dinner, we each get a tag and write one blessing we are thankful for.  Then we hang it on the board.  And we can't repeat any blessing of our own throughout the month.  Last night, Bella was thankful for her pet dinosaur.  You can see that she "writes" first and then I put the translation on top afterward, and I'm not entirely sure which dinosaur she's talking about.  In this house of girls, I don't think we even have a toy dinosaur.

At the end of the month, we write down all of our blessings in our "Thankful Notebook", which we keep with the Thanksgiving decorations.  (We did this with the Thankful Jar as well, so we've got a few years on record.)  It's so fun to review the blessings from years past when we add the new ones.
I really do have so much to be thankful for.