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When you look around the county this time of year, you can see many signs of fall. The beautiful leaves
are starting to fall off the trees and the fields are turning yellow. You can see pumpkins and corn stalks
on front porches and little scarecrows and mum flowers decorating the yards of county folk. As
Thanksgiving comes around in Canada, there’s talk of family turkey dinners with stuffing and gravy and
you can’t forget the pumpkin pie!
At MLP Residence, we like to celebrate Thanksgiving with our residents. We’ve done something new this
year. We had our residents, staff, and visitors write down what their thankful for on a colourful paper
leaf and hang it on our Thankful Tree. Our tree sits in the Grande Lounge for three weeks leading up to
Thanksgiving Day for all to admire as it slowly fills up with thanks from our MLP community.
The day before Thanksgiving, we come together around the thankful tree, and read off all the leaves to
learn what our community is thankful for. This year, we had many thankful for their families, their
homes, and for the staff at MLP. Some were thankful to be alive and healthy and able to live in such a
wonderful home. Reading the leaves is a great way to get people to come together and socialize. Once
all the leaves were read out loud, we had long conversations about old family traditions. Traditions that
went back from when our residents were children and having thanksgiving in their old family homes. We
heard about many different meal traditions and different desserts that you don’t see today. It was a
pleasure being able to reminisce about past holidays with our residents and learn what they did in their
childhood.
The kitchen also plans a wonderful turkey dinner for the residents on Thanksgiving Day. This is
important to do at retirement homes because not all seniors can travel to see their families on the day
of thanks for that big hearty family meal. We like to make sure that everyone gets to celebrate and eat
with family because at MLP we are like one big family.
