The Thanksgiving Tree

This year we made a Thanksgiving Tree. Neither Jon nor I are very keen to spontaneously talk about personal things and inevitably someone will want to ask, "What are YOU thankful for?" This usually means a couple of seconds of mental scrambling only to come up with something lame...like grilled cheese or chocolate covered walnuts while other family members wax poetically about family and friends. Our Thanksgiving Tree was an excellent way to get around the awkwardness. Not that there's anything wrong with being thankful for grilled cheese (I am...very thankful indeed!) but this tree gave us the opportunity to be honest without being embarrassed. Besides - I'm a writer not a public speaker. I took an old silver urn that Jon picked up from a previous job and filled it with florists' foam. I had some dried flowers from two old bouquets, cut them to size and jabbed into the foam around the edge of the urn. When we moved this past summer, there were dead bushes in front of our house. I pulled them up and left them in the back yard to use for kindling. One of them turned out to be a perfect tiny "tree" so into the middle of the urn that went. Burlap cut from an old coffee sack went around the base of the "tree" to cover the foam. Finally, we put out a stack of tags, string, and a pen and encouraged others to write their Thanksgiving thoughts down by hanging ours before the guests arrived. BEHOLD!

That's the final product! It turned out so lovely I may take the tags off and just decorate the "tree" with Christmas ornaments. And yes...those are real book pages hanging on the wall. That's what happens when I have a week off from school. TELL ME: Did you do anything different this year for Thanksgiving? Have any "unbreakable" family traditions you're dying to change? Just curious...