Thanksgiving is a special time of celebration and for reuniting with family and friends. It is a time for being thankful for our blessings, reminiscing about past successes and remembering those that are no longer with us.

There are so many things we have to be thankful for this holiday season, and this season calls for us to slow down to remember them.

In school, our younger children are learning about Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. Make the time to talk with your children about what Thanksgiving means to them and to our country. Find out what they want to do to make this Thanksgiving Day a special one. Ask them what family traditions you have they want to continue and find out if there are some new ones they want to start.

The Weidle Family traditions include watching the Macy’s Day Parade, using the special plates, and eating lots of family favorite foods such as sausage and cornbread stuffing. Here are more of the Weidle Family favorite activities:

Thanksgiving orphans – We coined this phrase a while back when we realized we weren’t the only ones who don’t always have family in the area gathering for Thanksgiving. Instead of dining alone, consider gathering as many friends as you can stuff into a house and have everyone bring their specialty dish to share. The past few years, we’ve had special friends adopt our family for Thanksgiving Day.

Thanksgiving place mats – A few years ago, one of my older son’s teachers had students draw a picture of our family sitting around the Thanksgiving table. The picture was then placed on a 12”x18” piece of paper and matted with colored cloth. My son declared it his place mat for Thanksgiving. This prompted my younger son to create his own Thanksgiving place mat. What a great activity this turned out to be. Some of the more artistic place mats are laminated to use year round.

Thanksgiving table decorations – Sometimes it helps to give the little ones a special chore of creating decorations for the table. One of my favorites is making a paper turkey. Here are the basic materials:

Directions: insert one end of the paper tube through the center of two paper plates that have been stapled together. Decorate the short end of the tube to look like a turkey by adding head, beak and feathers made from construction paper. The eyes can be drawn on. For legs, you could use ones made from paper or add some pipe cleaner twisted to look like legs.

Thanksgiving play – Nothing is more precious than having children tell the story of the first Thanksgiving. You could go to the extreme of creating costumes and a script or keep it simple. The Weidle boys usually pull out their puppets for an extraordinary retelling of colonial times with a cast that includes Santa and Mickey Mouse. If your child made the turkey table decoration from the above activity, it can have a starring role in the play as well.

Thanksgiving hike – Once the turkey is in the oven, our family heads out the door for a hike. Our favorite spot is through the trails at Fred G. Bond Metro Park in Cary. One of the best moments is coming back home hungry and smelling the incredible aroma of the turkey in the oven.

Thanksgiving memories – Take the time to share stories from yesterday and today. I asked Brittany O’Neal, one of my favorite student friends, to share some of the things she values. O’Neal is thankful for having her family safe, the love and support from her family and community, and people opening their eyes and seeing things from a new perspective.

O’Neal thinks Thanksgiving is special because her family makes sure it gets together for Thanksgiving to share stories. She is thankful that she has a caring, loving family, which she believes, has become rare thing lately. The O’Neal family is willing to bring anyone in and make them family - all we need to do is pull up a chair!

Have your family pull up a chair and think of ways to put the thanks back into Thanksgiving. Consider having folks at your gathering write things they are thankful for and put them into a pile. One by one, read them out loud.

My Thanksgiving slips would include being thankful for my family and wonderful friends- the true treasures in my life.