Gratitude Jar

I love journals, and have been known to collect them and never use them.  So this year I thought we would do a gratitude jar.  The last couple weeks I have heard a lot of "can I have", "did you buy" and "why can't we have".  I realized maybe I needed a way to remind them that even though we are not a wealthy family we have a lot of wonderful advantages that others will never have. 

So we will be adding an item that we are grateful for every evening at supper time.  Now most people may want to start their day out doing this and that is great!  But, at our house we are up rather early and in a hurry to get ready and out the door.  So, a supper time ritual gives us a little more time to discuss what they write. Which I believe is going to be the most important part of this lesson!

You could easily print out something from the internet, there are a lot of thankful projects.  I chose to just make slips of paper out of cardstock.


First, I chose my colors which my phone did not pick up well on this dreary, cloudy, cold day! I chose an orange and a beige.

I then folded and tore them into strips, with the help of the teenager.

  A little note--don't ask the kid with OCD to help!  While he liked the look of tearing them ("rustic" he called it), he had to fold them perfectly and use a pen for "crisp" folds.  It took us awhile to get them done, but I love him to death as his room is the neatest I have ever seen for a 13 year old boy!  

When I knew how many I could get out of a page, I figured out how many I would need.  I figured 4 a day for 30 days.  So, 120 slips!  I also new I wanted to do a gratitude slip as a family once a week and one for my hubs and I as a couple once a week.  So I did 4 pages and got 128 (I knew there would be days my hubs didn't do this or we forgot. So, I figured being short a few wasn't going to hurt;).

Why does my orange, look pink?

I then swiped one of the Fall Votive Jars to use as a holder for the blank pieces.

 

Still looks pink!

I then placed a large jar with the other votive jars and a few other fall decorations in the middle of our dining room table. 

The little jars above are old glass salt and pepper shakers that no longer had lids.  They are filled with candle wax from an old candle that didn't have much left to it. 

We will start our gratitude jar on November 1st and continue until the end of the month.  I may even make some extra slips and have our Thanksgiving guests share!