Preparing for 15. Adults.

I love Thanksgiving. Love it. It's my favorite holiday. But, more on that later. This post is about some of the preparations for the day, not about the day itself. 

This year, Seth and I will be hosting our 4th Thanksgiving. Our 4th and by far our biggest! 15 adults and 6 kids (6 and younger) at last count. Whew! But, seriously, the more the merrier. We love hosting, and are thrilled to be spending the day with our friends and family, but there is some serious planning involved with a group that large for a sit-down dinner. And part of that planning, my friends, is place cards. 15 of them. 

Given that the group is a little eclectic this year and fairly large, I wanted the place cards to be fairly large (so as to be seen from several feet away, down the table) and quite simple (so as to not take my entire life over the next week). 

Here's my process:

15 pieces of brown (5x8.5), 15 pieces of golden (2x4ish), 15 felt turkeys (from Michaels), and 1 brown Sharpie

fold the brown pieces of cardstock, write the names on the golden pieces

combine, and you're done!

Each year during Thanksgiving dinner, we go around and say at least one thing for which we are thankful. It was a tradition we brought to the Spofford family when we started hosting (I'm sure I read about it somewhere because we didn't do it in my family growing up), and now even the kids love it. They look forward to it, talk about it, and my oldest niece, Delaney (age 5 then) was so excited about it last year she wanted to be last. She wanted to be the last person to express what they were thankful for. I loved that she had been thinking so much about her opportunity to do so that she had a preference about when she shared it. LOVED it.

I was reading in a magazine this year that families should take time at Thanksgiving to record what they are each thankful for. I loved the idea immediately! Since we already take time during the meal to express our gratitude, all I had to do was come up with a way to record what people say. I thought of several things, none of which were very creative or exciting, and then a blog had an idea of each person writing what they are thankful for on a feather-shaped piece of paper and sticking the 'feathers' into a yarn turkey. It was a cute idea, but I wanted to scrapbook these pieces, not create a centerpiece. And so, the idea was planted of having them be separate pieces tied to a themed whole. And then I had it. The perfect idea!

I used my Cricut (pronounced like the bug: cricket) to cut out a tree and some leaves. I wrote "I am thankful for:" on each leaf, in different directions/places, so that when I scrapbook them, they can be semi-randomized on the page. I plan on asking everyone who can write (we have all the speaking kids say something) to write down what they share and to sign their name. This way I'll have a record of what everyone said from year to year.

I have some leaves that I plan on spreading along the table as decoration, and these will be there too, one near each plate. I'll be hiding pens underneath the fairly large place cards, and people can write their thing down whenever they feel like it during the meal. I'll collect them when we're done eating, and scrapbook them whenever I get to that spot in our album. I'm SO excited about this!