From the Book of Life: A Thanksgiving Advent Banner

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"I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've seen it happen all over the blogosphere---where thriving blogs that I know and love just go silent.  Sometimes the blogger will say something about health or family or business opportunities.  Sometimes they just don't say anything at all.  

When Miriam and I started blogging, we never thought we would be "one of them." But a funny thing happens when you load your wagon with a husband and kids and jobs and church and homes and holidays and laundry and life: something inevitably has to fall off the wagon to make room for everything else. Well, Miriam and I decided to keep our husbands and most of our kids, but we had to take the blog off the wagon for a while until everything shifted places and we could squeeze it into the corner. 

Today I finally dug into that little corner of the wagon and found our lovely blog and its readers patiently waiting for us.  Thank you.  We have missed you.

While we probably aren't at full steam yet, I thought I'd give you a glimpse into the holiday hullabaloo around these parts.

Here's the thing: I look at November more as an appetizer to December.  My hubby, however, loves Thanksgiving more than any other holiday.  (I surmise that this is because he doesn't have to cook the Thanksgiving meal.  Just a thought.)  So while I've been playing Christmas music and wearing red all month, my husband has been pondering pilgrims and pumpkin pie and wishing everything Christmas would just wait its turn around here.

I don't always understand him, but I love him.  So I did this.  I dug into my fall bins and found some unused sprays of silk fall leaves.  I snipped them off, wrote "Thanksgiving" on the front with some fabric paint, and clipped them to some twine with some mini-clothespins.  The effect isn't quite as stunning as I would have hoped, but the best part is what you DON'T see.

On the back of each of the leaves, I have taped a piece of paper with a Thanksgiving activity written on it.  Here is our line-up:

T - Do a Thanksgiving Mad Lib as a family

H - Write a "thank you" note to your teacher

A- Give a toy or outfit to charity

N - Do a secret service for someone in the family

K- Play "Build a Turkey" with dice as a family

S - Make pumpkin chocolate chip cookies together and share them with another family

G- Say only grateful prayers today

I - Pilgrim Trivia at dinnertime

V - Say "thank you" 10 times today

I - Play Thanksgiving Bingo

N - Make Thanksgiving Story Bracelets

G - Read a Thanksgiving Book

As much as I hate to say it, I think my husband was on to something.  I'm glad we've paused for a least a moment or two to celebrate the spirit of Thanksgiving.  Our little advent of gratitude and family togetherness has been nice.  Really nice.  

But so help me, once we've bowed our heads in prayer and tucked into the turkey, I'll be diving headlong into tinsel and ornaments.  After all, you can only keep Thanksgiving on the wagon so long . . .

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