What will you be doing for the Holidays?  This year the season is not the same.  Many of us are still trying to decide what to do.  Should we spend time with our families at home?  Celebrate with our parents?  Ask our children to join us for the day?  Inside or outside?  Despite the uncertainty of our daily living, I still feel grateful for those closest to me and am fortunate enough to have my children home with me. We remain positive and are planning to honor tradition albeit on a smaller scale and al fresco. 

Virginia and I often celebrate the holidays together and this year we are setting up tables in her back yard.  She has programmed the event to a tee sending out lists via email to all family members (even honorary ones like me) and she has arranged to have tables placed in the yard at a socially appropriate distance. We are fortunate to have a temperate climate in New Orleans and that allows us to consider planning our holiday outdoors where it is safer to gather with our loved ones. There will be 10 of us but we are each sitting at tables with our immediate family members. We are planning to use the Avenida Nosegay dinner napkins and we are creating lovely, casual floral arrangements with the ceramic frogs that we carry in the store. 

With these wonderful frogs, flower arranging truly becomes effortless.  We are also incorporating colorful turkish glassware - at cocktail hour we are using the old-fashioned glasses for Bloody Mary's and Milk Punches and we are adding colored tulip-shaped water glasses to our table settings for  another punch of color.  

Here are some more ideas for making your holiday table fun and festive:

    Colorful Linens - Mix and Match Festive Floral Runners

Colorful Candles

Layering

We especially love the creativity of our in-store designer and entertainer extraordinaire Teddy Lowery.  He learned to make rosettes for the table out of linen while in culinary training and he finishes his designs with leaves from the garden.  He makes it look soooo easy!  

 This year, if you cannot be with the ones you love, go all out for the ones who can be with you and at the very least, your zoom calls and photos will be stylish, fun and enlivened with color.

Wishing you love, good health and joy for this Thanksgiving and into the Holiday Season.  

xoxo,

Grace