Thanksgiving Tree

Denna told about 30 Days of Thanks on her blog, and challenged us to join NaBloPoMo.

That is National Blog Posting Month, and you can join officially on that site. I won't be posting what I'm thankful for each day: I'll post it at home instead. I thought I'd tell you what we have been doing at our house during November--we started in 1998, I think. Every day up until Thanksgiving, everyone (visitors too!) who is at our house at supper time writes down what he or she is thankful for that day. It is written on a leaf (cut out at a teacher's supply store on one of those die-cut machines) and then put up on our Thanksgiving Tree. Here's what it looked like after we put yesterday's leaves on it:
It looks kind of empty right now, but by the time Thanksgiving comes around, it will be so full it will be hard to find places to put the leaves. Everyone over the age of 5 has to think of something different every day. The younger kids are asked, "What makes you happy?" and we write down their answers. Everyone signs his name, and the date is written down, too. That first year, JT was 2 years old and he had "Walmart" written on most of his leaves. Yesterday Luci said, "I like China."

When we started this tradition, I cut out a tree from brown paper grocery bags and glued it to bulletin board paper, then stapled it to our basement door (stapled on the back of the door, where it would not show the staple "scars" when I removed the tree). We glued the leaves on then, and that seemed pretty good but it made it very difficult to save our favorites each year--they were glued on very well! After about 5 years of that, I figured out that making a tree we could use year after year made more sense, so I had the whole thing--tree and bulletin board paper--laminated (if you do that, make sure your design will accommodate the doorknob and also will fit in the laminating machine!). I have Velcro on the door and tree at the top and bottom, and the tree comes down after Thanksgiving. The Velcro stays on the door all year long, but it's on the inside where it won't show. The tree paper extends long enough to go over the top of the door and slips under the door at the bottom, and the Velcro on it sticks to the Velcro on the door. We use "sticky tack" stuff to put the leaves on with, and we can save every single one now.