For the fourth consecutive year we filled our little thrift-store jar that we etched with the word “Thanks” back in 2010. Before everyone dives into the gravy (metaphorically speaking), we wanted to share a few highlights from this year’s gratitude jar tradition.
Spoiler: one of the things we’re thankful for is you. So for a moment — thank you for reading, for dropping by, and for being part of this small but meaningful corner of the internet.
This year has been wildly full of surprises and blessings: moving into a new house, expecting a new baby, a busy book tour, working on a showhouse for Habitat for Humanity, and hearing our names mentioned by Oprah. We still can’t fully express how grateful we are that a blog started for fun back in 2007 has led to this life.
Back to the “thanks jar” tradition: since 2010, every November we each write one thing we’re grateful for on a slip of paper and drop it into the jar. You can look back at earlier years to see examples of what we included, but this year felt special because Clara is so chatty and colorful — she dictated every single entry she wanted on her cards and colored them herself. Last year we prompted her with suggestions; this year she came up with every item independently. She even drew a portrait of me that looks hilariously like a football — absolutely priceless.
We also adopted a simple color system this year to make it easy to tell who wrote each card: Clara’s are yellow, mine are orange, and John’s are red. When we revisit these pages in years to come, the colors will quickly show who “spoke” each day.
Some of Clara’s favorite things included:
- Making smoothies with Daddy
- Santa! (a seasonal crossover)
- Legos and building very big castles with Mommy
- Going to the beach
- Grammy & TomTom and their toys
- Playing in her box crib (we currently have a refrigerator-sized box in the living room that Clara fills with animals and toys and insists on living in)
John and I noted some overlapping favorites too — we both listed The Walking Dead, iPhones, and the mighty miter saw among the things we appreciated this year.
Every Thanksgiving Eve or Thanksgiving Day we open the jar and read the notes aloud together. We also pull out past years’ slips and enjoy how they freeze little moments in time: shows we watched that have since been canceled, trips we took, popular songs that have faded, and private jokes that once seemed indispensable. Those small pieces of paper become a portable memory bank we can always revisit.
Originally I planned to keep this post short — just a quick “Happy Thanksgiving” with a chalkboard photo and let everyone go enjoy their stuffing. But apparently I got wordy. Maybe it’s the smell of cookies baking. In any case, thanks for indulging the extra chatter.
We hope you have safe travels, good food, and loving company this holiday. We’ll be spending time with family, doing a few kitchen projects, and working on some Children’s Hospital projects that we look forward to sharing when we return (probably three pounds heavier).
More Thanksgiving Crafts & Traditions
We love celebrating Thanksgiving at home. Here are a few other holiday crafts and traditions we’ve shared over the years:
- A free Thanksgiving printable to mail messages of gratitude to friends and family
- Creating a Thanksgiving gratitude chalkboard display
- Our daughter’s first year writing Thanks Jar messages
