Got gratitude? This simple Thanksgiving tradition is a great way to bring your family together and get everyone thinking about what they’re grateful for this holiday season.

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I love Thanksgiving. It’s one of my favorite holidays, actually. I mean, can it get much better than eating really good food and spending time with the people you love? Oh, and you don’t have to buy presents or any of the other commercial hoopla that often creeps into many of the other more popular holidays. Now, that’s a holiday.

I also love that Thanksgiving reminds us all to be grateful for the blessings we have in life. Did you know that grateful people have been scientifically shown to be happier and healthier? Okay, maybe that’s not total rocket science, but there’s a really interesting study that was done at Harvard University about the power of actually expressing gratitude regularly.

Essentially, researchers asked one group to write down a few sentences each week about things that they were grateful for. The other group was asked to record weekly various annoyances they encountered. At the end of the 10 weeks, they found that the “grateful” group not only reported higher levels of happiness, but they also had a more optimistic outlook, exercised more, and even had fewer visits to the doctor. How’s that for the power of positive thinking?

I want my kids to grow up to be grateful people, so last November our family made a gratitude wreath together to keep track of all the things we were grateful for. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was a great way to spend a few minutes every day talking with our kids about how blessed we are.

This year, we changed it up a bit. We were painting fall leaves the other day, and I decided to do some painting, too. By the time my boys had covered the kitchen table in leaf crumbs and paint, I had created this fun tree. I’m no professional artist, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I’m calling it our gratitude tree.

Similar to our wreath last year, each day we are going to write one thing each of us is thankful for on a leaf (no repeats!) and tape/glue it onto our tree. I’m excited for it to be a visual reminder to my boys of how much we really have to be grateful for.

If you’re getting a late start, it would also be fun to do this just the week of Thanksgiving (or even just Thanksgiving Day). See how many leaves you can fill out all at once, and put it on display during Thanksgiving dinner as a reminder of our blessings.

Oh, and just for fun, I made a printable leaf template to speed up the leaf cutting process. You can download and print it below!

Here’s what you need to make your own gratitude tree:

Gratitude Tree

A Thanksgiving Tradition

Materials Needed:

• poster board (or large piece of paper)
• brown paint (I just used my kids’ paint)
• paint brush
• cardstock in various colors
• scissors
• printable leaf template (free download HERE)
• glue/tape

Directions:

1. First, paint your tree. I just Googled “painted trees” and found one I liked to model my own painting after. I’m no professional, and I’ve never taken a painting class, so you really don’t have to be a whiz with a brush.
2. Print out your leaves. The template looks a little funny, but there’s method to my madness, I promise. The template has one vertical column of leaves and two vertical lines. Fold your paper into thirds (hot dog style) along the lines so that the leaves are facing out on one side. Then, cut out the leaves. This should make it so that every leaf you cut out actually gives you three leaves. Hooray for efficiency!
3. Hang up your tree somewhere visible…ours is on the wall of our dining area.
4. Start adding leaves of gratitude! We’ll be adding one leaf per person per day, but use whatever method you want.

Waloo! Easy holiday tradition that will be meaningful for everybody.

If you’re looking for more ways to make the holidays meaningful, try Random Acts of Kindness Bingo.

What are YOU thankful for this year?

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