Sunday, April 5, 2015

Reality Check


It seems every ladies magazine I pick up has a spread on tablescapes.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with this vital element of entertaining – maybe due to more pedestrian issues like earning a living – these are all about the decorative do-dads and spingdivots you can use to clutter up the dinner table. For instance, long terra cotta containers growing real grass, or pipe fittings sprayed a festive gold.
Call me a philistine, but I’d rather use the real estate for food.

          And place card holders are even more ubiquitous. According to these magazines, we should all be squirreling away wine corks or cast-off jewelry to prop up the little cards upon we've used our calligraphy skills to write everyone's name.

          Granted, we don’t have a large family. Our gatherings rarely stretch to more than fifteen people, but I still can’t imagine a holiday in which any of us would need help deciding where to sit. And that assumes anyone would follow directions in the first place. Seating is more often based on who’s left-handed, who needs to get to the stove easily, and which grandchild needs help cutting his meat.

          As a hostess, it’s all I can do to make a successful meal and have enough dishes to put it on, never mind spray-painting twigs from the backyard for a clever winter arrangement or filling low bowls with water to artfully float the non-existent blooms from my garden. More likely, in our family someone would complain they couldn’t see across the table or the grandboys would be dive-bombing their peas into the mini-ponds in front of them.

         

10 comments:

  1. I'm with you, Marty. No fancy stuff where there's real eating to be done. :-)

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    1. And I wonder how good the food must be if the person hosting has spent all her (his?) time painting clothespins and writing names on tiny cards.

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  2. I don' t do fancy either....the people and food are the most important! Happy Easter~ :)

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  3. My sentiments exactly. In fact more often than not we opt for paper plates when the attendance reaches 15.

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  4. I agree with you. Dining table real estate should be reserved for food.
    In low enough dishes that people can see each other.
    Those tables you have pictured have so much stuff on them, there's no room for food!

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  5. The best decoration at a table is smiling faces.

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  6. These table settings can only happen at open houses, and are out for potential buyers to admire the taste and refinement offered by the house.

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  7. My family would not even notice the place cards telling them where to sit, let alone sit where their name was! I've seen some of those table scapes on Pinterest and wondered who comes to the pinners' houses because they are certainly not the same people who come to mine!

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  8. right? who has the time for that? I'm happy if everybody just sits at the table.

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  9. Yeah, all that foofiness is silly. I'm happy with a plate and a fork!

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Thanks for stopping by and I'd love to hear what you think.