"I'm thankful for..." Ornaments

About a month ago, I wrote a post about different Christmas Traditions you may want to start with your family or friends. My all-time favorite on the list was the "I'm thankful for..." ornaments. It's a dual-holiday tradition, so on Thanksgiving you all write why you're thankful for each other on a strip of paper. Before you decorate your tree, make ornaments our of the papers, and you can read them aloud while you adorn your tree with so much gratefulness!

I just HAD to start it this year. Before Thanksgiving, I made this image on Photoshop:

I opened a new file, set the paper size to US Letter, and used an image of ornaments from a Google search which I then reduced the opacity. Though I used Photoshop, I'm sure you could use Word just as easily. I printed and cut them out, and on Thanksgiving, we filled ours out together.

I went to one of the craft stores near me and bought:

A pack of glass ornaments (enough to have one ornament for each participant)

Some shredded glitter snow stuff, kind of like this

Opaque paint markers

I used a piece of paper as a funnel, stuffed some snow in, and shook it around to make it stick to the sides. Then I rolled the "I'm thankful for..." paper up and put it in the ornament. These were kind of a pain because the paper flopped around a lot. Next year, I think I'll leave extra room on the paper so I can make it wider...that might stop the rolling around. I've also thought about using fishing wire to "hang" it from the opening of the ornament. Not sure, I'll have to experiment. Last, I used the opaque markers to write the year on the bottom, very important! This is how they came out:

I'm in love with them! Can you imagine...in five years, we'll have 15 ornaments of why we're thankful for one another. Now THAT is what Christmas is all about.

If you're looking for a slightly less pain-in-the-ass approach, you could just Mod-Podge the pieces of paper on to little wooden shapes you find at the craft store, paint them, glue on a ribbon, and be done with it! That would make them so much easier to read. Get creative!

TIP: If you do the craft snow, make sure a hand-vac is close by. That gets everywhere!

Hope you liked my ornaments just as much as I do. To you and yours, have the most wonderful Christmas Season!

xoChristie