RAR #55: Best Thanksgiving Books – Cultivating a Spirit of Gratitude
What happens when you get three book-loving ladies together to chat gratitude and the best Thanksgiving books?
In this episode, you’ll hear:
- there’s just a bit of excitement
- so Sarah orders a book on air! (We love it when she does that!)
- and then we end up with a big list of great books like the one below
So join the whole Read Aloud Revival Team – Sarah, Kortney, and Kara- as we chat picture books, pie and our favorite suggestions for instilling gratitude in our children through stories.
Then head to your library or Amazon to stock your book basket full of sweet titles with messages of thanks.
Thanks to all of you for making what we do here at the RAR possible – we are so grateful for YOU.
Click the play button below:
Books from this episode:
(All links are affiliate links.)
I just listened to this episode again for some ideas for this year’s thanksgiving! Thanks again for all the recommendations and I would add another fabulous one I just recently found ‘Thanks for Thanksgiving’ by Julie Markes — it’s so good and the illustrations are so rich and vibrant, even in the board book edition — a new favorite for sure :)
You mention another author at 26:26 of the podcast Shawna something? Possibly not a children’s book author, but I was wondering if I could get her name and/or the book you were talking about? Thanks!
Kathryn–it’s Shauna Niequist, especially her book Bread and Wine. :)
I’m new to RAR, but have been collecting children’s books long before I got the privilege of being a mom. One Thanksgiving book I think is a must-have is Dav Pilkey’s ‘Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving’. You won’t be disappointed!
Thanks for the recommendation, Lindsay!
Hello all. How can I print this list? We read many of these books this month and would love to remember them all for next year.
Hi Jillian! We have printable lists (to go along with every episode of the podcast) inside the RAR Membership, but not in the shownotes. If you’d like a good printable list of our recommendations for November, you’ll find one of those here. :)
Great podcast! Can’t wait for the Christmas list!! I forgot to mentioned that a favorite of us to just be grateful is “Thankful” by Eileen Spinelli, great book!
Thank you for your podcast! Your enthusiasm for books is very contagious, and the book list that accompanies each podcast is so helpful that I can usually sit back and simply enjoy the conversation instead of waiting with pad and pen to write down the names of the books discussed. I have one request. Could you please include the authors and names of the books that the children share in “Let the Kids Speak” in your show notes? Sometimes they are said quickly and I miss it, and sometimes I just have a hard time figuring out the proper spelling of an author’s name.
This is not quite a Thanksgiving book in the traditional sense, but it is related. Balloons over Broadway by recent guest, Melissa Sweet, is a great book. I read it to my 8 and 5 year old last night. All of us really enjoyed it! It is a true story about the man who created the balloon floats for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. And, if you are a homeschooler (we’re not) or just like digging into more learning or projects with your kids there are SO many options: science, the arts, history, etc.
Oh, you’re right! We should add this one to the list!
Hope a little shameless self-promotion is alright here:)
This is the link for my book Feast of Memories:
The Thanksgiving table is set, but the guests have not shown up and 10 year old Leonard cannot wait to start eating. Grandma Sadie wisely distracts him with memories till the rest of the family arrives.
Feast of Memories is available at:
https://www.amazon.com/Feast-Memories-Katie-Brewster-ebook/dp/B01MG13K17/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1479348084&sr=8-2&keywords=Feast+of+Memories
Loved it!! Looking forward to the December list. It’s like Christmas morning when these lists come :)
Since I found your site this summer, I print each month you’ve had Favorite Month Picture books and immediately request from my library. (I learned my lesson last month that if I don’t do it the day you publish your blog post, the whole month will go by before I ever get off the waitlist. Who wants a Halloween book in February!?) Anyways… I’m glad for some suggestions from you because it saves me tons of time. I place a request via the library app, I swing by and pick them up and we’re off. No keeping three rowdy boys quiet while I dig through the stacks looking for appropriate picture books. However, I’ve been so disappointed in so many of the titles you recommend. Many of them feel fairly painful for me to even finish reading it one time, let alone read it multiple times over the course of the week(s) we have it. I wonder if you have a quantity vs quality goal so that you can present a large amount of options to your readers. If so, I totally get what you’re doing. Otherwise, I’d like to request that some better time be spent choosing. I’d rather have 5 or 10 good books to get than 30 mediocre ones.
Cranberry Thanksgiving was glorious. We read it 7 times in the week we had it and I was so sad to see it go back that I added it to our Amazon wish lists for gift ideas. I’m so excited to see from this post that there are more Cranberry books!
My sons are adamant that Over the River and Through the Wood is a Christmas story even though we read it and it’s obviously not. I put it in my never-get-that-again category after one page! While it might be classic, it’s not something my boys were ever going to be into.
Too Many Turkeys is on the edge of being good, but just isn’t. It’s taken a smidge too far and just loses itself in the end.
The same goes for Thanksgiving is here! I loved 3/4 of the message it gave, but the finished product gets too busy–dingdongdingdongdingdong! I love that the chairs don’t match and that it’s all about gathering around and about helping, but the baby crying and yackityyack stuff is just blech. Plus, there’s the part where you take your shoes off or you don’t! It’s like the author kept adding and adding which just took a simple, nice message and made it muddy. Or they couldn’t make up their mind so they added for that reason.
I stumbled upon (not from your list) a Plump and Perky Turkey and thought it was the most delightful story I’d ever read! Plus, the illustrations are gorgeous. Definitely add it to your list!
ps. Not related to books exactly, but I would love to listen to more of your podcasts that don’t feel essentially like only homeschooling families read aloud. We’re a public school family for as many reasons as people feel convicted to homeschool and we’re totally read-alouders too. It seems a subtle hint is trying to be given each time that homeschooling is the best way to go. Or, that simply anyone who reads aloud (and thus listening to the podcast) must be a homeschool family. They’re not exclusive of one another.
Hi, Sena! Thanks for your note. I love that you found A Plump and Perky Turkey and that it’s a delight. I’ve found that the more I read aloud with my kids, the better I am at choosing books from booklists that resonate with our family.
You are in good company–there are lots of RAR listeners who aren’t homeschoolers. Have you listened to Episode 34 with Meagan Francis? She talks about fitting in reading aloud around a traditional school schedule. https://readaloudrevival.com/34/
In this episode, we three happen to homeschool and were speaking out of our own experience.
Happy Thanksgiving!
One of my favorite Thanksgiving books is Eating Their Plates: A Pilgrim Book of Food and Manners by Lucille Penner. Delightful and memorable.
Our favorite: GRACIAS, THE THANKSGIVING TURKEY. Soooo sweet!
This one is in our stack, but we haven’t got to it yet! I’m moving it to the top of the pile right now!
We read for our Canadian Thanksgiving, the book, The Thanksgiving Treasure by Gail Rock.
In Clear River, Nebraska, in 1947, the real meaning of Thanksgiving is friendship and forgiveness—can the holiday end an ancient feud between Addie’s father and his nemesis? Eleven-year-old Addie and her best friend, Carla Mae, are looking forward to Thanksgiving in their small hometown. When the girls make their annual bike ride into the country to pick cattails, milkweed pods, thistles, and gold leaves for their autumn bouquets, they find themselves near Old Man Rehnquist’s farm.
Mr. Rehnquist and Addie’s father became archenemies years ago during a feud over a pond that her dad dug for the farmer. At school, Addie and Carla are taught that Thanksgiving is a time for fellowship, and Addie has a great idea. She’ll invite Mr. Rehnquist to Thanksgiving dinner.
Will her dad and the grumpy old man be able to bury the hatchet—or will Thanksgiving be the start of a new war between the neighbors? Can the real meaning of Thanksgiving win out?
I think it would be a great book to add to your list.
Sincerely,
Carolyn
My dear neighbor Margaret wrote this lovely book partly inspired by her many brothers. I always loved it when they would all come over to her house for thanksgiving. They filled the whole neighborhood with music and life. https://www.amazon.com/Thanksgiving-Me-Margaret-Willey/dp/0060271132
Thank you so much for this recommendation! Looks like a really sweet book. Just put it on hold at the library…it probably won’t come in time for the holiday, but it’s always the right time for a good story about uncles and music!
Hi Kortney, if you want to have “Thanksgiving with Me” for the holidays, you can try this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh6yglAZtIA. As always, thank you for the nice list!
Great list. Thank you! We also love Thanksgiving Graces by Mark Kimball Moultan
We discovered The Thanksgiving Door this year and loved it! An unpredictable and fun read with a great message.
Squanto by metaxas! Hands down favorite.
Excellent book suggestions!
Thank you for what you do.
I just have to say I am so disappointed in some of these recommendations. Especially, Thank You, Sarah. I feel like there were many hidden liberal agendas. Thanksgiving is a time to express our gratitude to God and everything He has done. Another shallow book was Thanksgiving is Here!
I agree with you!
Thank you for pointing this out, Amanda.
Oh, I didn’t think that all. I ordered the book when I heard the podcast and thought it was wonderful to hear that a single person was so relentless about making sure Thanksgiving was a national holiday. I don’t know where the hidden liberal agenda was.
I was more disappointed with the book “Bear Says Thanks” and the opening page says that Bear is bored, bored, bored. Bummer, considering I don’t encourage that word in our home, I almost put the book back in the packaging and returned it. But then again, I can’t expect books be suggested that only I would like for how could that be a wide variety to reach 50,000+ subscribers from all walks of life?