Thanksgiving Family Fun

Holidays are perfect times to have some extra fun and build family traditions and memories.  Here are some of our favourite Thanksgiving family fun traditions below.

Ideas for Thanksgiving Family Fun

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Cookie Turkeys

As table favours and as little gifts for our neighbours, my daughter’s class, my students, and co-workers, we’d make cookie turkeys.  Essentially, you use one cookie for the base and one for the tail (I usually use fudge stripe cookies but many different kinds will work). 

Use frosting as your “glue” and add something as the body (I use a chocolate covered almond). You can leave the tail as is or add candy corn as the tail feathers. Then, you can use candy corn for the head. Try putting out a bunch of ingredients and letting each person come up with their own designs.

Thankful Trees

Make a “thankful tree”.  We’d cut out a tree trunk from cardboard and paint it.  Then we’d cut out a bunch of leaves from coloured construction paper and every day, we’d write something we were grateful for on a leaf and add them to the tree trunk.  The goal was to fill the tree with leaves before Thanksgiving came!

For our dinner guests, we’d use a smaller version of the thankful tree idea.  We’d make turkeys for each of them using pine cones as the base (the walk on a cool Autumn day to gather the pine cones was half the fun!), acorns or something similar as the heads, and adding faces with markers or felt or something like that. 

We’d use leaves (real, fake, paper) as the tail feathers and for each pinecone turkey, we’d write down things about each person that we were thankful for on the leaves.  These turkeys would be take home favours for our guests and would give them a visual reminder of just what we love about them!

Five Kernels of Corn

Another option to use with our guests was the “5 Kernels of Corn” and this was always a very meaningful moment for all of us.  At each place setting, we’d place 5 kernels of corn – either dried corn or candy corn. 

Then just before eating, we’d pass around a little cup and each person would drop a kernel in while stating something he/she was thankful for.  We’d continue passing the cup around until all the kernels were put in it.

Nature Walk and Decor

Take a walk before dinner and look for some pine cones, fallen leaves, or other items and use them to put together a centerpiece or individual decorations for each person’s place setting. Or grab some paper napkins and markers from the dollar store and decorate those for each person.

Important reminder: Don’t pull living things from the ground or off of trees and other plant life. Look carefully and be sure not to disrupt any animals’ habitats when picking up things.

Blessing Mix

Make Blessing Mix to snack on while waiting for the big holiday dinner to be ready.  I’ll give you the basics here but often my daughter would come up with a new idea and we’d adjust our recipe. Encourage your family to share their ideas of what to add to it!

Mix together: Bugles corn snacks to represent cornucopias/horns of plenty (the harvest) , pretzel twists to represent arms folded in prayer or hugs, candy corn to represent the few kernels that early settlers had to survive on, nuts and/or seeds to represent the future harvest, Hershey’s Hugs and Kisses to represent the love of our families and friends, M & M’s to represent the Many Memories that we share. 

Another fun table favour, was to use an ice cream cone as a cornucopia – we’d put icing around the rim and then dip it into seeds or sprinkles or something like that.  Then we’d fill the cones with a dried fruit and nut mix, topped off with Runts (fruit shaped candies – you can find other candies like gummies that are shaped as fruits too). 

When we’d lay them on people’s plates, the fruit candies would spill out of the cone onto the plate and make a really pretty display.  Plus it was all edible!

Put out some craft supplies or even some building toys like Legos and encourage your kids to make some table decorations for you. Or lay them out for your guests and challenge each one to create their own table decor. It’s a fun activity that is sure to bring out the laughter for everyone.