Homemade Thanksgiving Tree Craft

I've seen Thanksgiving Trees pop up all over the blogosphere, and I thought it was about time I made one for our home. I chose to put our Thanksgiving Tree next to the front door. While it's not an easy spot to photograph, it is certainly easily visible as we rush in and out on our way to various commitments. When I'm cranky and busy, it's nice to have a reminder of the wonderful blessings in our life together!

Here's what you need to make your own simple Thanksgiving Tree:

• Kraft Paper (mine is crumpled because my girls were using it as a modeling runway and a pretend picnic blanket, go figure)
• Pencil
• Scissors
• Newspaper and/or colored paper for leaves, or pre-cut leaves from craft store
• Tape

My first step was to find a wall large enough for a paper tree.

I settled on an unfortunately cluttered area next to our front door...it was filled with a box and bags of donations for Salvation Army, a basket of stuff I have not looked at in 3 years, and a bag containing a binder and plastic paper sleeves that I bought weeks ago to make a "Family Binder" and have not gotten around to yet.

It looked awesome. Here's a "Before" shot:

I measured the wall for a rough size of the tree I wanted to make and marked those off on my kraft paper before free-handing a tree-ish looking shape with my pencil. My 5 year old wanted to help too, and I love how you can see my laundry baskets in this photo too. Wow.

With the tree sketched out, it was time to cut:

Before we taped our creation to the wall, I decided to add some wording ("We are Thankful") to the roots on the tree:

How do we use our Thanksgiving tree?
Every day this month until Thanksgiving Day, the girls and I each write 1 thing we are thankful for on a leaf and tape it onto the tree.

I tend to write down more frivolous things (like shoes and mochas) so that the girls understand that there are all kinds of things we can be grateful for. This is a great exercise for me too...I spend a lot of the holidays worrying and stressing out about pleasing both sides of our families and how we will manage to ever start our own little family traditions. It's nice to take a break from that and focus on the good.

We all love the "After" (though it's still in progress). And the best part was that it was FREE because we had all the supplies!

Does your family do any "thankfulness" crafts or activities in November?

Linking to Thrifty Decor Chick, Home Stories A to Z, Tatertots and Jello