One thing I’m very thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day is all of the readers who stop by to check out what’s new at Manolo for the home and to share their thoughts with me. It’s a privilege to write for all of you, so thanks! And happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the states!
(Photo by Lane & Anne)
Thanksgiving, at least in the States, is less than two weeks away, and for the second year in a row The Beard and I will be serving up dinner here at our very own home. Our extended families will be elsewhere, and we will miss them as we chow down on a Celebration Roast instead of the turkey they’ll be eating. Last year we had a guest, but this year the roster of diners will be limited to ourselves and the baby who can eat just enough real food to enjoy her own Thanksgiving feast.
Our table? Will be simple. We resist the urge to serve up the mashed and stuffing on plates and in bowls embellished with gaudy cartoons of pilgrims and Indigenous Americans. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, though if you were to ask me I’d tactfully suggest steering clear of that whole bushel of iconography. The holidays should not be an excuse to lose one’s sense of good taste.
So what have we got here…
Personalized napkins are awesome, eliminating as they do the need for place cards. Plus, guests can take them home at the end of the meal! Country Living has simple directions for the DIY crowd.
Printing coordinating menus, place cards, wine glass labels, and other paper goods for the table is easy. Just choose a color palette to coordinate with your tablescape and clip art to jazz things up a little. Conversely, sites like Paper & Cake sell print-at-home kits that make printing everything you need for your Thanksgiving table easy-peasy.
Martha Stewart’s Thanksgiving tables range from the fresh and cool to the modern to the downright dowdy, complete with pine cone turkeys. Note that pine cone turkeys are fun for the very young and the very young at heart, but do look silly. Can’t help that.
This table was DwellStudio founder Christiane Lemieux’s American Thanksgiving design, featuring plenty of DwellStudio products, natch. It’s sort of busy and understated at the same time, which isn’t entirely off putting.
Love the pitcher. Like the use of leaves. Love the chairs. Love love love the sunshine! My ideal Thanksgiving would be hosted by someone else (preferably a vegetarian, but I’m not picky) in a sunny and very warm locale. Screw autumn.
Finally, here’s more of what you can do with printable templates from Paper & Cake. Yum!
I just received the season’s first invitation to a Halloween party. I know, I was just as surprised as you no doubt are. Autumn won’t even begin for another twelve or so minutes. But now that I hang with mommas and babies more often than I hang with 20-something hipsters, I guess I’m going to have to get used to extreme advance warning when it comes to holiday parties. Fair enough.
The invitation did get me thinking about Halloween and Halloween decorations and especially Halloween candy, but mostly about decorations since I do write a home and living blog. A quick sweep of Amazon reveals just what I thought it would: goth coffins, bloody handprint cling film, angry cats, severed heads, and goofy grinning pumpkins. There are even Halloween trees and Halloween treesHalloween tree decorations, if you can believe it.
Luckily, decorating for Halloween and other holidays doesn’t have to mean throwing good taste out the window. Suzanna Frosch and Blake Tovin‘ of New York’s lower Hudson Valley demonstrate that you can get ready for a night of ghosts and ghouls without sacrificing your home’s exterior to the Great Pumpkin.
Following their lead involves little more than a pair of scissors and some paper. Country Living has great Halloween decoration templates from white chocolate spiderwebs to upscale jack-o’-lantern designs, and of course, spooky bat stencils.
I am consistantly surprised at how many Easter decorations I’ve seen in recent years. Back in my day — if I may be allowed the luxury of playing at being old — people hung decorations for Christmas and Halloween and that was about it. You’d see the occasional Hanukkah decoration, but they weren’t at all common, and there were very, very few outdoor Easter decorations, if any, hung on neighborhood homes.
That meant no lights…
No Easter flags…
And certainly no inflatable bunnies on choppers… I mean, really? An inflatable Easter bunny riding a motorcycle? So you tell me:
Last year on this most romantic (or most un-romantic, depending on who you are) of days, I featured furniture for the broken-hearted. This Valentine’s day, I’m feeling a little more upbeat and a little more optimistic, perhaps due to the little one on the way, so I shall present you with a quintet of quirky gifts for the home from Kikkerland.
While it’s certainly no gaudy heart-shaped box of inferior chocolates, a tin of heart-shaped paperclips is a lot less fattening. Ditto for the heart hot water bottle cozy, which will at the very least keep some part of your anatomy warm. The cupid’s arrow scroll holder will either get you a kiss or a restraining order, depending on your message. You might also say it with heart-shaped magnets or perhaps even combs, though I’m not sure what exactly you’d be saying… Get organized! Brush your hair! I love you!
Romantic? Not quite. But if you’re dating someone and you’re still in “I like you a lot and don’t want to scare you off” territory, you could do worse.
Like I said over at Manolo for the Brides, whatever your preferred end of December holiday, I hope it’s a happy one! Me, I do Christmas, and while I copped to a Christmas tree for The Beard’s sake, I would much rather have set up a Shelf Tree, like this one by Frank Visser of IJM.
Holidays are by their very nature a little tacky, and Christmas is the tackiest holiday of them all. Bright reds and deep greens typically look awful together, but we tolerate the combination around Christmastime because those are the colors of the holiday. Suddenly traditional plaid fabrics are de rigueur and metallics are out in force. Snowman figurines become legitimate decor. Blow up statuary appears on lawns all over town. Blissfully, it all gets socked away for another year once the Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drops.
Before we can all once again hide our secret holiday shame, an act which brings with it its own wonderfully guilty pleasure, the people at Tacky Christmas Yards collect pictures of the most garish outdoor holiday decor displays they and their followers can find. The entries for this year’s list are still coming in, but there are plenty of tacky yards from 2007 that may amuse.
The holiday season is once again upon us, which means it’s time for holiday decorating. If you’re like my father, you have already hung your outside lights, decorated your Christmas tree or put your menorah on display, and erected the largest Christmas village this side of Hallmark. If you’re like me, your holiday decorations are on a UPS truck somewhere and might arrive in the next two weeks. Whatever your holiday decorating style, you may enjoy gazing at or even craftily copying the reinvented wreaths featured in a recent LA Times slideshow.
Last year, I gave relatives homemade wine cork wreaths as holiday gifts. Many hours and two severe burns later, I decided that I’d buy holiday gifts this year. That said, if I did decide I wanted a holiday wreath, I’d probably still make my own, and I could do worse than to use the above wreaths as my inspiration. Forget boring evergreen branches — wreaths can be made of anything from leafy greens to feathers to driftwood.
I’m proud to say that I actually have quite a bit of my holiday shopping done, though this is by no means usual. This year, I copped out and went with gifts for the home. I guess it’s fun trying to buy gifts for my elders who already have everything they need, but I just plain don’t have the time this year to dedicate my time and energy to shopping.
What do all the parents and grandparents in my life have? Homes, that’s what. And I’ve never heard anyone complain that they simply have too much cute in the kitchen.
What you see:
Arg! Halloween is almost here and work has kept you far too busy to dig the giant hanging spider out from the basement! What to do, what to do? You could do what Sylvar did and transform cheap Ikea accessories into re-usable holiday decor.
How did he do it? It took:
It also took about one and a half hours. Sylvar is calling it a harvest moon, which I think is an apt description. You could also tape black paper eyes, a nose, and a toothy grin onto the REGOLIT to make a jack-o-lantern that magically becomes a lamp when Halloween has come and gone.
