From Canadian Thanksgiving to American Thanksgiving, we are all about the turkey in our household. Thanksgiving has long been my husband’s favorite holiday, and so, over the past 20 years, we have developed a vast array of traditions, household items, and other assorted things that we like to do every year to mark our season of Thanksgiving.
Every evening after dinner, we try to add a thankful leaf to our tree, each of us being thankful for something new every day. There have been many things over the years—from being thankful for a new baby, the end of lockdown, or mom’s new washi tape. The only thing we don’t allow on the thankful tree is sarcasm, and that’s a new rule this year because my eight-year-old is a punk.
Every year we pull out Dad’s Thanksgiving playlist, a carefully curated list of songs put together with love over the years. This past year saw the addition of two new songs to our list that have quickly become household favorites. “Gobble Gobble” by Matthew West, is hilarious and a real earworm. The kids and I end up yelling/singing this song so often. The other is much more sentimental, “The Thanksgiving Song” by Ben Rector. It appears on his Christmas album, but we can forgive him for that!
For the month of November, and much of October, our house is filled with pumpkin pie, pumpkin pancakes, and pumpkin crafts. We spend a lot of time at this time of year in crafts, and each year there is something new—either from a website or Instagram post or from the shelves of the local craft store. This year Juicy Juice sent us some juice boxes and a list of fun crafts to do with those juice boxes. As we held a family event in early November as well this year, we were able to get juicy with the whole family well ahead of the big day.
Our first craft was the Juicy Thanksgiving Owls. Now, the directions here are to use a color printer to produce your owl, but since we like to color (and don’t have a color printer) we improvised, and each got to put our own spin on our nocturnal friends. As always, Grandma’s was the most artistic, and Dad was relegated to scissor duty.
Our second craft, and my favorite, was the Juice Box Turkeys. Now I am a sucker for any turkey craft, be it handprint, feathered, or a turkey made out of a pumpkin, and this I just adored. We have a plethora of foam paper in our house at the moment—we use it for the thankful leaves—so we substituted foam in place of the construction paper. We also could not find our stash of googly eyes, so got inventive. This is definitely going to be something that makes it into our annual rotation. Now I just need to find a spiked cider juice box for me to drink during the parade!
We have yet to attempt the third craft, but given the amount of Thanksgiving-themed scrapbook paper I have accumulated, I am looking forward to some Turkey Cones this weekend.
Here are the links to all the instructions and printables, along with some Christmas crafts if you are ready to skip the turkey!
Thanksgiving:
Christmas:
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