Friday, November 1, 2013

A Month of Thanksgiving

This will be my first year doing Cathy Zielske's 30 Days of Thankful.  I have felt for some time that Thanksgiving tends to get squeezed out in the rush/busyness towards Christmas so I was looking for a wayto be more intentional about Thanksgiving.  Our 2 sons are grown and married. They live on the opposite side of the country from us.  My husband and I both work in healthcare and frequently work holidays.  My husband will be working Thanksgiving this year.  So I'm hoping that choosing one thing I am grateful for each day will help me celebrate Thanksgiving all month. 
Whenever I begin a project like this I tend to look for the definition of the word(s) I am focusing on. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines thanksgiving as:
  • the act of giving thanks
  •  a prayer expressing gratitude
It's not too late if you are thinking about doing 30 Days of Thankful or a similar project.  There are lots of ways you can do this. WikiHow has a good article on the basics for starting a gratitude journal here:
http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Gratitude-Journal

A Gratitude Journal can be one sentence a day, every few days or once a week.  The entries can be longer but if you want to maintain a long term practice of gratitude journaling it is recommended that you keep your entries brief.
Writing in your journal is one way to detail what you are thankful for but you could use photos, drawings or artwork instead of or along with your writing.
Your Gratitude Journal could be private, in an art journal, a scrapbook or album, a blog or on Facebook.  It just depends on your comfort level of sharing.


Here's where I am as I write this post tonight.  I have decided to go with an 8" x 8" size.  I have the page protectors on hand but will need to order an album.  I have a pink 8 x 8 album but that doesn't have the right feel for me for this type of album.
I'm looking at a WeRMemory Keepers 8 x 8 leather album in a fall-ish color and hope to order that tomorrow.  I have the first 11 pages cut but will need to cut cardstock down to 8 x 8 to place the pages on.  If you missed my earlier post about this I failed to read Cathy's instructions that came with the download so the images printed at 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 rather than the 6 x 6 that Cathy intended.  I decided not to re-print and am improvising as I go.  I hope to get most of this done this weekend so that going forward I will just complete my journaling each evening after work and add my photos every few days.  That's the plan (fingers crossed).
Have you ever done a gratitude journal or similar project?  Are you doing one this year?  Please share your experience or what you are doing with us.

I'm thankful you are here....

1 comment:

  1. I'm not doing a thankful journal this year, although I have in the past used a journal to record what I'm grateful for each day. It's a great experience. This month I'll be following along here & am thankful for your reminder to look for things we are thankful for each day! Happy November!

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