OUR COOKIE THANKFUL TREE

This is going to be a short, mostly picture filled post, because we still have family in town.  I'd like this post to be close to when it happened, so I'm trying to write it out quickly right now.  We just finished a tasty dinner of Butternut Squash soup and leftovers that my very kind mother-in-law is cleaning up.  Having family in town has many advantages.

A few days before Thanksgiving, I finally got a "thankful tree" done with the girls.  Last year we did a big, decorative one on the table.  We didn't quite manage anything that elaborate this year, which did mean we managed to avoid the glitter disaster of last year.  I made these cookies a couple of weeks ago and froze them, so all I needed to do was decorate the cookies.  After seeing Sweet Sugarbelle's Turkeys - I realized I could do the same thing with a Thankful Tree.  Here's a quick run through of how I did it, in case you want to try next year.  It really is easy.



I hand cut the tree and made grooves in the frosting as it hardened to make it look like bark.

I started with leaves that were red and brown, and then I used Wilton Food Color Sprays to give them more depth.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy- as Lily would say.

It left such pretty fall shapes!



For the letters, I used a leaf stencil and different colors.



After that, the girls and I wrote things we were thankful for on the leaves using Food Writers.  The girls LOVED doing this.





I loved seeing the things they were genuinely thankful for, and we used it to help practice letters.




We fought over who got to eat the "hell" cookie.  Lily was thankful for "shells," and this was the result.



We are so thankful.  Truly.