Thanksgiving Trimmings

We try to rotate each year who we are spending Thanksgiving day with and this year we will be sharing Thanksgiving with Coach's side of the family. My sister will also be spending Thanksgiving day with her husband's family so our parents will be spending this holiday without us. Don't worry, we came up with a simple solution and decided to celebrate Thanksgiving early with my family. Because we celebrated early we decided to eat a non traditional Thanksgiving meal. We had chili and grilled cheese sandwiches. Ummm so delicious!

Since we had chili and no turkey I thought I would share with you some of my homemade decorations. I can't give credit where it is due because I saw these ideas on the internet but forgot where. So sorry.

First, I have always wanted to try and cook a turkey but this wasn't my year. So I made one!

This is meant for a children's table and the idea is to fill it up with popcorn and "carve" the turkey so the kids can snack on it while the dinner is being prepared. I didn't have that much popcorn so mine got filled with plastic bags.

The middle is a regular size grocery sack filled with plastic bags and the ends are hot glued down.

The legs are lunch sacks filled  with plastic grocery bags . The white paper ends were cut and hot glued to the lunch sacks keeping the ends closed.

Finally, the legs were hot glued to the sides of the turkey body.

I didn't have a platter so mine is sitting on a oven rack with green card stock cut in the shape of parsley.

Second, I had to have appetizers and something to hold those appetizers. The idea behind this one is to set these little turkeys on the tables so you can snack while the food is getting ready.

These are lunch sacks. The tops are folded over with googly eyes, hand feathers and a beak glued into place. I filled my bags with salted peanuts in the shell, miniature Reese's cups and my favorite mix of peanuts and candy corn.

Last but not least, I decided I would dedicate a bare corner in our home for the different holidays or seasons. So naturally for Thanksgiving I decided to do a thankful tree. I made my tree trunk with the brown painters paper you can get in the paint department at any home improvement store. I stuck it to the wall with that sticky stuff that teachers use so your paint doesn't peel off when your project comes down.

Then I cut out leaves and an owl using my awesome die cutting machine. We listed what we were thankful for on each leaf then stuck it to the tree. Curious what we are thankful for? Jackson helped me come up with ideas. Jesus and God are always first on our list, next we listed family and then we got real serious. We listed hot dogs for Everett and basketball for Coach and Jackson was real thankful for his boots and his milk. Me, well I'm thankful for my family and my job.

I hope you enjoyed a little peak into our Thanksgiving and we hope you all have a wonderful and blessed holiday!