The thankfulness tree.
With it getting a dark so quickly after The ‘Fish is home from school each day, we tend to get little bites of cabin fever during the late fall and winter months. After reading this post by Ashley Ann Campbell a few days ago, the boys and I came up with our own version of a Thankfulness Tree to regulate the funkiness.
The idea was that each time we had a thankful thought, we could each go over and write it down.
We would hang our thankful thoughts on the branches and fill them up throughout the days leading up to Thanksgiving especially, but maybe longer…like Christmas.
The boys, however, had lots of thankful thoughts the moment we sat down.
Like The Rev here. Since he can’t write out his words just yet, he drew pictures of things for which he’s thankful. This picture? It’s a pig…clearly.
He was most thankful for his friends.
Nerf guns and toys and his teacher came quickly after, as well as pictures of duckth, thpiderth, and hortheth.
Within about 30 minutes, our Thankfulness Tree was nearly filled.
Have you read the book or seen the movie, The Help? In it, there is a woman who writes her prayers down instead of just saying them. In doing so, she gains a reputation of having very powerful prayers and her friends beg to be on her prayer list.
I kind of had a secret hope that these little slips of paper would be like those prayers, even if it was only to say “thank you.” Another secret? I really love shuffling over to the coffee pot in the morning, grabbing a cup of joe, and leaning back against the counter to look over at the kitchen table where a few straggly branches hold little pictures and scribbled through words of thankfulness that my two tornadoes called children thought to put there.
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
:Meister Eckhardt:
Amen to that.
