Week of Thanksgiving: Lip Balm

Kiddos with their lip balms.

If you couldn't tell, I love Thanksgiving.

A lot.

And it's about more than turkey and pumpkin pie, or even getting together with family. It's about a chance to give sincere thanks for everything that we've been given in preparation for the celebration of Christ's birth in December. I have found that the Christmas Spirit is much more powerful if I have spent a lot of time developing a spirit of gratitude and giving the month before.

All month long, in our house, we've been counting our blessings and putting them in our "cornucopia." (A picture of that will come later this week.) We've talked about pilgrims and the native peoples who helped them to save themselves. We've read our very favorite Thanksgiving books, including The Mousery, An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving, Over the River and Through the Woods, and Pumpkins. We've talked about service and put together boxes for Operation Christmas Child. We've been building up to this week.

Today, to start off the actual week of Thanksgiving, I'm using an idea I got from the blog Mustard Seeds, and we made our own lip balm so we can say "Sweet Words of Thanks."

First, we read the following scriptures and talked about HOW we give thanks...

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (Through prayer.)

Psalms 28:7 (Through song.)

Matthew 15:36 (Through service and an "abundance mentality.")

Then we talked about how the way that we give thanks involves our mouths, and how it's good for us to give thanks.

Then we made our own lip balm. There are lots of recipes online (Mustard Seeds has one that uses shortening), I chose to use plain vaseline, but you can also use beeswax.

In our case, I took a tablespoon full of vaseline and mixed it with a dollop of honey and some unsweetened Kool Aid. You can also add food coloring, if you want. Then we put the lip gloss in the little jars you can buy at Walmart for holding beads. The kids added stickers, and we decided who we want to give the lip balms to at church today to say thank you.

The kids loved this activity, and they loved listening for the action words in the scriptures. Today, we're going to use our mouths to give sweet words of thanks!!