Thanksgiving mantlepieces

We’ve started a little tradition I like to call the “holiday mantle” in our house this year, in which we pin or tape up lots of random pieces of kid-created holiday-themed artwork for the next upcoming holiday. We had a Halloween mantle that looked just as “ghetto” (as Rob likes to point out) as this Thanksgiving mantle.

But I am quite content to have things looking hodge-podge and scribbly if it inspires the kids. For this mantle (I didn’t get the whole view but you get the idea) we’ve got a lot of preschool art projects combined with drawings that Will colored and cut out at home for the express purpose of decorating the mantle: a couple loin-clothed Indians, a pumpkin, an ear of corn, a deer with a huge rack of antlers. Owen did some scribblings and cut them into sections for the mantle, so we call that Thanksgiving art too and give it its rightful place among the masterpieces. I’m not sure if we’ll find room for a Christmas mantle between the stockings – but we’ll find some other place to string up art and then return to the mantle for Valentine’s Day and Easter.