What a fun idea for a party! A pie exchange, much like a cookie exchange but held within days of Thanksgiving, gives the guests a pie to take home for their thanksgiving feast. Check out these Thanksgiving party ideas from celebrations.com and you too can host a Thanksgiving Pie Exchange Party.
Continue reading
Our friends at celebrations.com have created a thanksgiving feast to impress even the stuffiest of guests. Using our Elegant Gratitude Thanksgiving invitation as their inspiration, the decorations, table settings and menu incorporate simple, natural elements with a modern twist of elegance.
Using a centerpiece of wheat stalks (find out how to make it yourself at celebrations.com) they anchored the display in a bed of leaf sprigs that echoed the invitation, supplementing the display with nuts, pumpkins, artichokes and acorns. Metallic coatings on the leaves add a touch of modern elegance.
Finally, to help stimulate conversation at the table, a basket of conversation starters was passed around. Pear Tree Greetings’ Thanksgiving notelettes, pre-personalized with the words “I am thankful for…” are a perfect way to get the conversation going.
If you are lucky enough to have a warm home to go to this Thanksgiving, filled with the mouthwatering smell of roasting turkey and the happy chatter of family and friends, then you have plenty of reasons to be thankful. It’s easy to get swept up in the hubbub of cooking and decorating and family squabbles, and to lose sight of what’s most important on this uniquely American holiday.
Everyone has their own Thanksgiving family traditions, such as helping out at a food shelf or participating in a fun activity like an annual touch football game, but when everyone finally settles around the table we all share one thing: our thanks. Some families appoint one person to say grace, others join hands in a prayer or a song. Still other families go around the table and ask each person to share something they’re thankful for.
Having been put on the spot a few times, some of us at Pear Tree thought it would be a nice idea to create note cards especially for this purpose. These little Thanksgiving notelettes ask the question “What are you thankful for?” with a blank area beneath the message or inside the card to write in your answer. You could also use simple thank you cards. We love this idea, for lots of reasons.
First the activity is meaningful for both kids and adults. The notes can be filled out in advance and read aloud, or passed around the table. You can even make a game out of guessing who wrote each one. Best of all, they can be kept! Send each guest home with their note as a remembrance, or give them to the hostess or the eldest member of the family. Thanksgiving is a time to count our blessings, and these little notes are a tangible reminder that we have a lot to be thankful for. It may even become a new Thanksgiving family tradition.
If you’ve ever hosted Thanksgiving dinner for a group, large or small, you know how much planning, cleaning, shopping, prepping, baking, chopping, and basting goes into pulling it off. At the end of the day, of course, all that hard work is forgotten as you bask in the praise from your stuffed and contented guests. You are happy to make the effort because a successful Thanksgiving is not as much about the food as it is about being with your loved ones, catching up on each other’s news, playing games, watching football, and sharing the family traditions you’ve established over the years.
On those occasions when we are not hosting but attending as an invited guest, however, it’s important not to take your hostess’s efforts for granted, no matter how calm she appears or how many years she has “done” Thanksgiving. Aside from offering to bring something to the gathering and lending a hand while you’re there, another way to show your appreciation for the hospitality is to follow up with a handwritten thank you note.
Every hostess loves to hear that her gathering was as successful as she’d hoped it would be. A thank you card is doubly appreciated if the hostess is someone you speak to often, such as your mom, your sister, or your best friend. Often we neglect such social niceties with our closest relatives and friends, and those are the people who will most appreciate your honest and unexpected words of thanks. If you’re lucky, she just might share her recipe for that delicious pecan pie in return.
Some of the most thoughtful ideas we hear from our customers have to do with thanking others around the holidays. One mom we know encourages each child to choose an extended family member and write a thank you note to express their gratefulness for that person or for something they did that meant a lot to the child. Sure, there will be notes like “Thank you for the Legos you gave me last Christmas,” but if expressing thanks is a practice you want your child to learn, this sounds like a good way to start. In this family, Mom would then encourage the family member to send a personalized note card back, so the child would experience the joy of hearing how much others care about them, as well as the simple pleasure of getting a personal note in the mail.
