It’s become a tradition worth documenting: each November, I create a pile of leaves out of paper, a hole punch, and a length of string. Every night at dinner in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, we go around the table and write down something we’re thankful for. Then, we hang them on branches in our living room cut from a bush in our yard. They’re the same branches that adorn our living room every other day of the year, but in November, they’re hung with bunches of these paper leaves. I try to remind the kids that there’s more than one spot to hang them, but they inevitably end up in clusters.
The things we write down range from the expected (“family and friends”) to the specific (“Great Wolf Lodge”) to the silly (“athleisure” got my gratitude in 2020 for sure). Batman had a good run in our house for a long time, and once I remember being particularly thankful for our washing machine after a few rounds of puke.
It doesn’t take much to create your own thankful tree; just a few branches (or some hooks, or a jar, just a place to keep them), some paper, and some string. Most years, I don’t get around to making the pile of leaves until a week or so before Thanksgiving arrives. With a family of five, that’s still plenty of leaves to go around.
I can’t claim this is a wholly original idea. I don’t remember how it started. I probably based it on something I saw on Instagram. Yet this is a project that has stuck with us. I scrolled back through our photos to discover we’re already on year six of this tradition. It’s a small way to practice gratitude amidst the cooking and family drama, travel and entertaining, toddlers, and exhaustion—you know, life—this month.
I have the leaves saved, unceremoniously, in the bottom of a storage bin in the basement. It wasn’t until last year that I thought of keeping them all in a bag labeled with the date. Maybe if I’d thought ahead, I would have done that from the beginning. I don’t have any plans for all these saved little leaves. Perhaps someday we’ll look back at the piles with three-year-old and four-year-old and five-year-old scratchy handwriting and decipher them, try to guess which year and the person they belong to. Who was thankful for cheese, for Taco Tuesday, for their health, for Lin-Manuel Miranda, for books?
The kids sometimes ask, “When do we get to do our leaves again?” It’s one of those traditions I didn’t even realize I was creating at the time, kind of like our penchant for pizza on Saturdays or movies on Fridays. It’s become a part of their memories and more than the leaves, that is a beautiful thing.
