Friendsgiving!

This year I planned Friendsgiving with my dear friend Jessica. She was gracious enough to host it at her apartment and we spent so much time making it perfect. I am so thankful for all my friends. Everything that I go through, I know I will always have at least one of my friends by my side. I have a really hard time expressing how I feel towards people but they really do mean the world to me. I am probably the happiest girl I know, because of my friends and my boyfriend. 

Jessica and I decided early on that we wanted to have a gold theme. We shopped at places like party city, craft warehouse and dollar tree. After Halloween, places have a lot of their decorations on sale. She also went out and found pine cones and leaves that she let sit out and dry before spray painting them gold. After spray painting the leaves, she wrote on them with peoples names as their place cards. It was beautifully done.

I spent a majority of an evening trying to make the perfect Friendsgiving sign. Jessica had bought a burlap table runner on clearance at home depot so I cut triangles out of them. She had old curtain samples that I made into letters and we found fake leaves at craft warehouse that I hot glue gunned onto the burlap. The string is actually a fall themed garland that I unraveled.

My centerpiece I made was from an old mason jar I had sitting around. I glued a burlap ribbon around it and through in some pine cones, fake jewels, and acorns to hold the fake flowers that I found at dollar tree up. It turned out to be perfect.

The serving table and the drink table where very easy. We took an old sheets and blankets that Jessica had and turned them into table clothes. We used the gold pine cones and fake leaves as decorations. She also spray painted a fake pumpkin and gourds gold.

Setting up the dinning table was our favorite part. We had gold square plates, gold napkins, gold cups and perfectly placed utensils. We loved that table!

Candle holders where made from old beer bottles
 that got wrapped in twine or spray painted gold.

Overall, it was a perfect evening with the most perfect people. They are who I am truly thankful for and happy to have in my life. 

LOVE

This is a lot different than my other posts. I had to write a paper about love for school and I really enjoyed what I wrote. I thought that maybe it could be good advice for someone younger than me. I wish eighteen year old Kristen knew more about the word love.

Love. A word that most people grow up hearing. You hear it from so many different outlets that it almost doesn’t seem like it has a true meaning. I love my mom. I get sad when I think about not having my mom. That is something I was just born to feel. There was never a moment where I had to think about it. I grew up feeling that way and it doesn’t even make me blink when I think about it.

People use the word love to describe how they feel towards intangible people or inanimate objects. Everyone at some point has said “I love my phone” or “I love that celebrity.” You cannot possibly really love those things. You like them. You might even like them a lot but you do not love them. It demeans the meaning of love when it is used as an adjective. I think the most important thing to remember is that love should be a verb and not an adjective.

I started dating my first really serious boyfriend when I was seventeen. We told each other we loved one another a week into the relationship. That was not love. That was blind infatuation. I let how much I liked him take over how I really felt inside. I am still not even sure when I actually fell in love with him or if I ever even did. I will never know because we used the love word before it was how we felt.

Now that I’m older, I see love differently. I’ve had my heartbroken. It wasn’t until just recently when I felt like it was completely healed again. I don’t know if I’m just more cautious of my heart or if I changed my mind completely about love, but I almost don’t believe in the word love. I would prefer to hear “I care about you so much, I want the best for you in life and I can imagine a future with you” then just hear someone tell me they love me. Maybe it is because I used to mindlessly say “I love you” or “I love it” so much, that now it has no deeper meaning. I wish I could have explained that to a younger me.