Thanksgiving Garland

I got the idea for this from The High-Heeled Mama when she was featured on Tip Junkie. I took the idea and made it my own, however. :)

The kids and I made it an afternoon project. We went out and tried to find a non-crunchy maple leaf -- not a simple task in late November! But we found one that was good-sized and brought it inside. Then we took yellow, orange, and red construction paper and a black crayon. We took the paper off the black crayon and did a crayon rubbing of the maple leaf on each sheet of construction paper and cut them out. We did a total of ten leaves, two for each person in our family. Then I used a Sharpie to write our names on them. I stapled them to a bit of ribbon and hung them on the wall. Easy!

Every morning and every evening until Thanksgiving we'll be writing something we're grateful for on our leaves. (As you can see in the picture, Spencer [age 2] is thankful for buses!) Next year I'm going to make our garland on November 1st and make 5 or more leaves for each person and do this for the whole month leading up to Thanksgiving!

Another idea is to tape the "leaves" on an outline of a tree & branches drawn on a piece of posterboard. That would be cute too! :)