Thank you so much for all the love you showed my good friend Brandi. Reading how much she’s touched each of you made me float.

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As I sit here tonight, Thanksgiving is two weeks away.

Tonight I’m sharing the first of four holiday posts as my family and friends are getting ready for Turkey Day: Being GratefulDecorating Without DollarsDressed for the Occasion and Stuffed! (all about the food!).

This year in particular I’m making a deliberate decision to reclaim Thanksgiving as a holiday in it’s own right and not just the first day of Christmas. I want to linger on thankful, relish in blessings and openly rejoice for everything I have instead of what I think I need. When I’ve taken this approach in year’s past, I find I’m much less likely to be depressed by what we’re not spending on Christmas and recognize how rich and full my life is right now.

So to celebrate today’s theme of Being Grateful, I’m so excited to have another bloggy friend, Becky from Creatively Content, here from half way around the world to share a beautiful Thanksgiving tradition she enjoys with her family.  She writes that her theme for this season of her life is to ‘use what we have’, and I can tell you that her blog is a beautiful testament to just that.

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Becky is an American blog momma living with her husband and three beautiful children in western Turkey near the Greek border. I’m always inspired by Becky’s faith, grace and creativity as she builds a wonderfully unique life for her kids.  I hope you’ll love the Thanksgiving Mailbox that she’s sharing today as much as I do.

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Hi everyone at THRIVE! I’m Becky from Creatively Content.

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The Thanksgiving Mailbox started because my girlies and me were sitting around making envelopes out of an old magazine and they played mail for a LONG time, sending sweet love notes to everyone in the family.

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So I thought it would be fun to have a Thanksgiving mailbox where we wrote notes every morning starting 2 weeks before thanksgiving of things we are grateful for and put them in our mailbox. We used heavy duty cardboard for the bottom and the sides and a cereal box to shape the middle and back.

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The stand came together using cardboard circles and toilet paper tubes.

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And everything was held together using hot glue.

The kids tackled the decorating with strips of magazine pages + mod podge since my scrapbook paper supply is small and precious.

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The envelopes are stored on the back of the mailbox in a little pouch with 5 little cards for each of us in the family to write what we are thankful for. 

One special thing I added was that 5 envelopes have each of our families initials on it and so each of us will write (some with help) 😉 one thing we are grateful for about that person. 

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On Thanksgiving day we will open up all the 14 envelopes and remember what we were grateful for and each have our own envelope to open and see all the special things our family has to be grateful for about us. (The kids will love to get their own mail!  We have one for Jesus, too. 

Thanks Nike for including me in your Thanksgiving posts and hope you come and stop by Creatively Content.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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You’re so welcome, Becky! I’m making one of your mailboxes for Family Home Evening with my Dirty Half Dozen.

I’ll hope you’ll stop by and say hi to Becky this week. Her corner of the world is literally thousands of miles from craft stores or fabric shops, yet she always finds amazing ways to use what she has and make do with what she doesn’t. Her blog is full of projects that celebrate the spirit of recognizing and being thankful for everything we do have in our lives.

Case in point:

No theatres to watch movies? Or too expensive to hit the theatre? No problem.

Becky just whipped up the coolest invite-the-neighborhood-over-and-watch-Toy-Story-2-kids-theatre.

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No cool race car floor mat? No problem.

Becky made one on the floor using masking tape. Genius.

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No sewing machine? No problem.

Becky just whipped up this adorable tiered skirt for her daughter without one. Seriously.

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Thanks again Becky for sharing your Thanksgiving Mailbox with us!

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And to all you out there in blogland…

… tell me …

what are you GRATEFUL for right now as you get ready for THANKGIVING?

(Can’t wait to show you part 2 of the THRIVE Thanksgiving series on holiday outfits. Like I mentioned at the end of Brandi’s post, this has been the happiest little accident ever.)

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4 Comments

  1. I am grateful that I get to host Thanksgiving this year. I love to host and I love to be able to make (and eat 🙂 ) my own stuffing/gravy/Turkey. More importantly, I'm grateful for the people in my family who I'll be hosting. I am so blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life!

  2. Anonymous

    I just found your blog and I love it, I love your attitude, and I love your grateful spirit!
    Our family keeps a gratitude journal that we each write in every Thanksgiving. We've done it for at least 10 years. It was my granddaughter's idea when she was small (she's 17 now). Everyone writes, even the little ones in their little scribbles. This year will be the first year without my Dad, but we will be remembering him with thankful hearts.

  3. I should say only that its awesome! The blog is informational and always produce amazing things.Thanks for sharing.

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