Thanksgiving Time

This year for Thanksgiving, we were selected to host Thanksgiving dinner for my husband's family.  It worked out well because Tim's parents live 7 hours East of where we live and his brother & wife live 9 hours West of here.  It made for a busy couple of days trying to get the apartment ready for house guests and prepping for Thanksgiving dinner.
I might have gone a little overboard on the goodies forgetting that I wasn't baking for my ginormous family of 12+ people.  Here is proof:

 Everything turned out Delicious!  We also had a great time spending time with my husband's family and Little Bear got some much enjoyed time being doted upon. :)

As a follow up to Thankful tree that I started at the 1st of the month, we did manage to fill it out quite nicely by the time that Thanksgiving rolled around.  It is amazing when we stop to reflect, just how much we do have to be thankful for. :)

Give Thanks!

Today is all ready November 1st and with Thanksgiving fast approaching, I wanted to do something special this year to help celebrate Thanksgiving all month instead of for just the one day.  I also wanted to help remind us what Thanksgiving is really all about.  Besides food, Thanksgiving is about giving Thanks to our God for his blessings.  The first celebrated Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims to give thanks to God for his protection through their journey to the new world and the first year here.  The first official Thanksgiving as a national holiday was started in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens".

 Because of the true history of this day, I wanted to do something through the month of November to help remind us of this.  And I wanted to do this to help set us into a thankful and grateful frame of mind for the Holiday season.  So after doing some searching for some ideas on Pinterest (where else!), I found a neat idea called a Thankful Tree.  The basic idea is to make a tree of some kind and leaves or tags to put on the tree.  Then throughout the whole month of November, to write down what we are thankful for on those leaves/tags and put them on the tree.  The whole idea is to have a tree full of things we are thankful for by Thanksgiving.  I love this idea and decided to put something like this together for us to do.  It turned out quite easy to do and since I had most of the supplies on hand, it didn't cost hardly anything at all either!  So here is to a whole month ahead of learning to give thanks for all I have! :)