Celebrating Thanksgiving

Anyone else out there celebrating Thanksgiving?  Or has everyone skipped ahead to Christmas?

Don't get me wrong, Christmas is definitely my favorite holiday of the year and I like to go all out with gingerbread houses, cutting down a fresh tree, and coating our house in multiple layers of tinsel and glitter, but I've always loved Thanksgiving and it makes me kind of sad that it gets the shaft - being stuck there in between Halloween and Christmas.

When I was younger, Thanksgiving consisted of me sleeping in, and waking up in just enough time to watch the parade while helping my mom make pumpkin pies (she made the crust while I made the filling), going to my grandparent's for the absolute best meal of the year, then playing games and eating said pie the rest of the evening.  Such a low-key, cozy holiday.

Taking a day to give thanks became even more important to us three years ago when we discovered just a few days prior that our cycle of IVF was successful and we were expecting our first baby after two years of trying to conceive.  When we went around the table to say what we were thankful for, we passed out pictures of our precious little embryo.

So I've definitely been trying to make Thanksgiving meaningful in our house and talking with Phoebe about the first Thanksgiving (and as one of my friends said, "Without going into the whole Trail of Tears thing", lol) and what it means to be thankful for what we have. 

The major bummer is that there really aren't a lot of decorations that scream "Thanksgiving",  and since I like to keep things festive around here, I've resorted to making a lot of my own.

Phoebe became really smitten with finding pretty leaves in October, so we ended up pressing a bunch of them and suspending them from our big picture window.  Of course my husband walked in and immediately questioned my sanity as to why there was a giant stick suspended in our living room (as I'm sure most of the other moms at playgroup were when I found it in the park and drug it back to my car a couple weeks ago). 

I also took some inspiration from Pinterest and made a bunch of these simple garlands by cutting out random leaf shapes from some felt scraps and sewing them together with a basic running stitch.

This little crocheted turkey and pumpkin pie have actually been around for quite awhile, as I went crazy during the early days of amigurumi and crocheted pretty much any free pattern I could find.  The turkey pattern can be found here, but I can't seem to find where the pie pattern came from.

I hope all of you have just as much to be thankful for!