We’ve started a tradition in our home which turned out to be a simple solution to bring gratitude into our busy lives. I am not good at naming things, so we can call it the “Thankful Post-It-Note Cabinets,” or maybe “Decorating With Gratitude.” I think you might find it helpful too, to practice decorating with gratitude, so here’s how you can make a difference in your home this way.
Empty Walls
Although my husband seems to not notice there is anything on the walls, between us other five, the wall space is a hot commodity. Sometimes I will come out of my room to discover my kindergartner took down a nice framed picture and replaced it with a taped up watercolor of splotchy spaceships and flowers finely titled “NBALCSSZZULE.”
Get your own house kid! Mom’s art takes precedence.
With wall real estate lacking and with 80% of my awake time at home spent in the kitchen, the cupboards for plates, bowls, and canned goods soon started looking mighty blank, colorless, and empty.
Intentional Gratitude
At the same time, I was really beginning to try to practice joy, gratitude, and thankfulness with my family–especially as hustling and rushing around can easily get us out of a peaceful groove. (And guess what happens while we are in the kitchen? Grabbing food to throw in bags before hurrying off is often a norm!)
So unless I was intentional about it, in seconds we would forget what is good and worth of praise.
Simple Solution to Bring Gratitude Into Our Hurried Life
What do you do when your figurative joy bucket is a little too empty and your scraped up cabinets seemed like they could use a good dose of love? I bought some packs of sticky notes and we promptly began.
The kids would come in for breakfast:
Me: “What are you thankful for?”
Son #1: “Cereal.”
Son #2: “Farts!”
Daughter #1: “My bed. Mom, can’t I just go back to bed?”
Daughter #2: “Not food.”
Me: With sighs and grumbles, “No, you can’t go back to bed, and how about the opportunity to even choose to eat?” I continue less abrasively, “For me, I’m thankful for Coffee.”
Anytime we’d walk into the kitchen, when they came home, after dinner, when I made a cup of tea for a visiting friend, when someone laughed we’d write it on stickes and smack it up on the cabinet walls.
It didn’t take long for it to become a game that the kids loved. Pretty soon the kitchen walls became a bright joyful mishmash of color. More importantly, it became a habit.
Passing Gratitude On to the Rest of the Family
By this point, I’d been actively regularly practicing gratitude in my life by writing in my journal, music, looking through joyful memories, or prayerful meditation (to name some). But passing it on to my kids had proved to be a whole different can of worms! I had tried a bunch of different methods and I just couldn’t seem to get anything to stick. But for some reason, these sticky notes stuck.
This year my daughter proudly informed me that her classmates declared her the most positive person in the class. Not that I want to take the credit for that (okay, maybe I do, just a little bit), I have no doubt these post-it-notes might play into that.
As their stickiness has slowly dried and they’ve fallen off over the year, we’ll laugh as we read the weird things written on them. As the colorful leaves fall to the ground outside, I am getting excited to plaster the cabinets with bright notes of gratitude again this autumn.
How Does Your Family Practice Gratitude?
How does your family practice gratitude? Do you have any traditions or methods to hack getting your family to think thankfully? Let me know in the comments or DM me!
And, if you decide to decorate with gratitude too, can you please tag me in a picture of your sticky-notes on the walls so I can get excited about it with you? And always, be sure to share this post if you think it might help others make a difference in their home too!
