Celebrate Thanksgiving with a visual gratitude list.
Making a visual gratitude list can be an individual or family Thanksgiving Day activity–between dinner and dessert or after the meal. Give everyone at your Thanksgiving meal a coloring page/template. Provide pens and colored markers or pencils.
In the center of the turkey or pumpkin or new cross-inspired gratitude page, write your name for God: “Holy One, Generous God, Creator, Sustainer, Beloved One,….” In the spaces or anywhere on the page, write or draw your “gratitude list.” Add color and doodles— lines, dots, or squiggles. Create more spaces, if your list is long. The list does not have to include large, sweeping things like “family, country, home, teachers, planet, God..”–though it can. Don’t just write the things others want you to say or those things you think you should be grateful for. Go for the little, ordinary things, the ones that give you delight, ease, or a moment of curiosity–gravy, mac and cheese, a tiny sea shell from the beach, Jesus, colored pencils, a Zoom meeting with friends, watering herbs, little prayers throughout the day, Pickleball, a text from a friend, a good book, reciting a Psalm .… Part of the purpose of a gratitude list is to learn to “think in gratitude” in the same way we learn to “think in French or Spanish” when we study a foreign language. Noticing simple, specific things helps to cultivate chronic thankfulness rather than just gratitude for the general or the extraordinary. I want to learn to be “abounding in thanksgiving” or “overflowing with thankfulness” as the writer of Colossians 2:7 proclaims.
Below are some examples and the free, downloadable templates: the new abstract cross, the flattened pumpkin, and assorted turkeys. Choose the template you want to use. Click on the link below the drawing. Download the template and then print. Feel free to make multiple copies.
“Pumpkin-like” template above.
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