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.