Countdown to Thanksgiving - Easy Centerpiece Ideas

If you're looking for easy ways to jazz up your Thanksgiving table, I came up with a few easy and possibly free (depending on what you have on hand) ideas.

1. Leftover pumpkins from Halloween. If you have any small pumpkins left from Halloween or have found them on clearance recently, they make great centerpieces! I had several leftover, plus I was given a few recently, so I used them as my focal point. There are lots of options with pumpkins. You paint them, write on them, or leave them plain. You could even have your guests write what they're thankful for on the pumpkins!
2. Use cake stands or cupcake towers to display on. I put my pumpkins and some leaves on my glass cupcake stand that comes apart. The variation of size makes it visually interesting. You could use just one or multiples. They are great for displaying candles, pumpkins, leaves, gourds, or whatever else you think up.
   
   
   
3. Fill jars with acorns, painted or all natural. We went acorn picking a while back at one of our local parks filled with Oak trees and came home with a grocery bag full of acorns. Once we baked them to get all the critters out, we just ended up putting them in jars around the house. They were pretty, but I wanted get a little more creative with some of them. I ran across this blog about painting acorns on Pinterest. This would be a great project to do with kiddos! We just used some acrylic craft paint we had on hand. They turned out beautiful if I do say so myself!
4.  Scatter some leaves and candles in the center of the table. If you are looking for a very basic centerpiece, this would be the easiest! I just grabbed a couple things of fake leaves at the dollar store and then cut them off the stems. You could then scatter any size combination of candles on top of the leaves. Or, if you want to get really creative, you could cut holes in gourds or apples and pop in tea lights, like they do here.

I ended up doing a combination of most of the above. The important thing is to get your creative on and have fun with it!

We will posting our final Countdown to Thanksgiving post tomorrow!