The Thanksgiving Table

While everyone loves to write about what a lovely time that had during the holidays with family and what wonderful food they ate, and yes we had a lovely time and ate wonderful food, I would rather chat about the table.

I love dishes. I have several dishes. I have my every day dishes, christmas dishes, a variety of tea dishes, old every day dishes I can't part with, a set of antique dishes I am collecting and wedding china which, unlike many people, I use regularly, no special occasion required. I don't know why I love them. They just make me happy. Now to really optimize my dishes I need beautiful table decorations to go with them.

I have done some table decorating with a friend over the past couple years. We stand in her basement and set pretend tables in preparation. I stand there and tell her we need different color or sizes of dishes or we need something tall or blue or whatever and she pulls any abstract thing I declare out of a secret compartment somewhere in her house and we create magical tabletops. I have done similar with my sister decorating the tops of her cabinets. I just tell her I need something tall and silver or green and flat and she comes up with something just right.

So anyway, back to Thanksgiving. I went over to my mom's on Wednesday to create a table masterpiece with no money. I brought my antique Fire King Peach Luster dishes since the color is so Thanksgivingie. A friend had given me a magazine picture with my dishes and they had used a pinkish table cloth with them so I asked my mom if she had something like that. She pulled out a burgandy table cloth that was perfect. We ran a brown sheer fabric down the center. I had brought salad plates thinking they might look nice on top of my mom's wedding china which is white with a blue border and silver edge. We put the whole thing on top of a silver charger plate. It did look nice but was missing something, the centerpiece to tie it all together. Down to my mom's storage closet we went to raid her decorations. We needed something blue, a vase or something. We found candles and pinecones and litte houses, anything that went with the color scheme and then back up we went. The only blue thing we found was a short blue vase that was perfect except for the pink petunias stuck in them. We decided we didn't like the flowers anyway so cut the heads off (the stems were glued to the bottom of the vase) and jammed in some apple things, added some pine cones, a brown bird statue and tied the whole table together in one spot, it was small but did the job. After that everything else fell together, little candle holders, tall candle holders, pinecones and pheasant feathers rounded out the look. Yes the food was good but my favorite part of Thanksgiving was looking at the table.

The bad color in these pictures will help you understand why I need my camera back from the repair shop and John wants a new work camera.