I hope everyone is having a wonderful time visiting family and getting prepared for Thanksgiving tomorrow!

In my family, on the day before Thanksgiving, we all get together at my parent’s house to clean and help bake pies and get all the food ready for the next day. The last several years, now that we have little kids in the family again, I’ve come up with little craft projects for us to do with them while the big kids are all cooking and baking. This year I decided to do a thankful tree. We took orange paper, printed out outlines of leaves, cut them out and had everyone write on them what they were thankful for. We punched holes in them, tied on some string and tied them to some branches from the backyard.

It turned into a cute, meaningful centerpiece for the Thanksgiving dinner table.

If I had planned it out better, I would have gotten several different fall colored papers, but we only had orange at home, so I had to improvise. We did color the backs of some of the leaves red and also hung a few real leaves to add some additional color.

Such a cute project to do with kids to help remind them of what the real meaning of Thanksgiving is and to help them “give thanks.” Evie had fun with it. She wrote on almost all the leaves before anyone else really had the chance to.

Here is the template that I found online and used for the leaves. I just printed it right out from there and the leaves were the perfect size! Have fun giving thanks!