Thankfulness garland

So in our family night last Thursday, we made a thankfulness garland with our kids. I took about 10 sheets of construction paper, cut them into 1" strips and got supplies ready beforehand (i.e. staplers, markers, etc.,)  Then in the evening after dinner, we sat down as a family, read Psalm 100 and began to discuss being thankful and thankfulness. We told the kids that we wanted to write down what we were thankful for on the strips of paper.

The first 30 or 40 were easy, things like our new house, food, toys, clothes, homeschool, our church family, Bethany's "ni-ni" blanket, our car and van, books, etc., then we started to get creative.  Some of the things that made it on the 2nd half of the strips were: slippers, a laundry room with doors, apple trees on our property, birthday parties, my blog, Facebook, Jesus dying on the cross, our chickens, football, baseball, music, the library, our homeschool co-op, individual friends and individual members of our family. It was a great time to talk to the kids about the abundance that God has given us and get them into the thankfulness mindset. Our children do pretty well at being thankful and saying thank you, but it is important to go beyond just the little things. It is wise to talk about ALL that God has given us and realize and remember that ALL things come from God. "Every good and perfect gift comes from above, coming down from the Father of lights, in whom there are no shifting shadows." (James 1:17)

The best part of our thankfulness night was the part when we were finished with the 100 or so strips we had cut, that we still thought of more things we hadn't written down! SO we wrote on the BACKS of some of them too! I felt like then the kids really had gotten the message. It was also fun to see what the kids came up with that they were thankful for. :-D

We will leave our garland up all week and maybe part of next week. It depends if it gets in the way of the Christmas decorations! But the garland stretched over halfway around our living room! Here are a few pictures:

I hope that you will take time to do something like this with your family this week and give yourselves a visual reminder of all that you have to be thankful for too! What are you thankful for today?