Jumpstart your journaling...Thanksgiving ideas

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, many of us are in the mood to make Thanksgiving related scrapbook pages and mini books. Here are some journaling ideas to help you add that "something more" to your scrapbooks and make them even more cherished by future generations.

•Count your blessings—just like the song says, make a page about all your blessings and “count them one by one.” This is a great way to use number stamps or stickers too! Possible page themes could be “10 Blessings of Today”, “101 Reasons I’m Blessed”, “5 Things I’m Thankful for Today.” You could even use an excerpt from the song itself on your layout. Below is the cover of a mini-book outlining “50 Years of Blessings” for a 50th wedding anniversary celebration.



•Traditions-Create a layout that highlights some of your ongoing Thanksgiving traditions. Do you always serve a certain dish? Is there someone who is always in charge of the turkey? Do you never have turkey? Is Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and football always on TV at your house? How have your traditions changed over the years? Do you ever eat out? How has Thanksgiving changed as your family has changed? Just think of how future generations will enjoy learning what traditions you celebrated that were unknowingly passed on to them. Wouldn't you love to know how your Great Great Grandmother prepared for Thanksgiving?!

•Recipes--Do you or a family member have a special recipe you only bring out at Thanksgiving? Or some special dessert that your family simply loves? Create a layout about it! Handwrite the recipe. Take photos of it when it's done. If it's something a family member makes, scan their copy of the recipe and/or include a photo of them holding or serving it. Here's an example...my grandma makes the best homemade noodles in the world! At holidays, she always makes them because she knows how much I love them. Even though she has many grandchildren, it's something I know she does to make me feel special (just like she does other things to make my cousins feel special too!) She has no recipe and when asked how to make them, her reply is always "Come over sometime and I'll show you." How special it would be to document this all in a layout, complete with photos of her, the noodles and the step by step photos of how she makes them...since after all she has no recipe!

•Black Friday--What Thanksgiving related scrapbooking would be complete without some reference to that most unbelievable shopping day of the year?! Create a layout documenting how you "observe" Black Friday. Are you one that gets all your Christmas shopping done that day? Are you up at 5:00 a.m. hitting all the best sales? Are you one that avoids stores like the plague that day? Do you do most of your shopping on-line? If you do lots of shopping that day, consider taking your camera along and take photos at your various stops. Won't it be interesting in future years to see the stores that you visited? The kinds of things that were on your Christmas shopping list? Maybe some photos of the latest must-have toys or clothes? Imagine you had created a layout like that back in the 70s or 80s! Something like this: "Our first Christmas shopping stop was at College Mall. Mom went into Lazarus and L.S. Ayres while I kept Sabrina occupied throwing pennies in the fountain. Our luckiest find of the day was getting the last Cabbage Patch doll Sears had in the store. After lunch at MCL Cafeteria, we stopped at Hill's Department store for more shopping. We found the new Rick Springfield album there. They even had a few Compact Discs in the music section, although I'm not sure how those work. We didn't spend much time looking at those since the players for them are over $400! December 1981."

If you have ideas of other great journaling prompts for Thanksgiving, please post a comment and share your inspiration.

Also, don't forget to send us photos for the Flower Technique Challenge below for your discoveries of new and unique ways to incorporate flowers in your projects. The lucky winner will receive a package of flowers along with a page kit. We can't wait to see what you come up with!