Be warned: Now that it’s December 1st there is no stopping me. I’m going Christmas crazy and you’ll be lucky to find anything non-festive on my blog for the whole of the holiday season! So let’s start how we mean to go on; with a blog post about setting your table for Christmas dinner and making your own DIY crackers!
Firstly, here’s my Christmas dinner table setting – what do you think? I’m actually rather pleased with how it turned out and I’d love to tell you how I decorated it. This table was set up for a festive dinner with friends last weekend (yes, we had roast turkey, chipolatas, honey-glazed parsnips – the lot!) so I wanted it to look suitably Christmassy to inject a little early festiveness to the proceedings. Here’s how I did it:
Firstly, I invested in some pretty felt placemats. I’ve seen these in lots of shops, at varying prices, but these are the lowest cost placemats I’ve found and they were from Poundland. I already had 4 round ones from last year, so I added another 4 circle snowflake placemats to my collection. The designs are slightly different this year but the change to the pattern is barely noticeable with a plate on top! I also got some rectangular place mats for the centre of the table so that hot dishes of yummy festive food could be placed on the table. By the way, the drinks coasters are personalised printed coasters that I made last month & shared on the blog – it’s an ice-breaker party game for guests around the table to guess the festive film quote!
To make a table look extra special for Christmas it’s important to shine your silver, polish glasses and lay out everything you’ll need in advance, such as salt and pepper, condiments and napkins. I spent about fifteen minutes folding napkins in advance so that we could all have a pretty fan on our plates to make the setting look more spectacular. You can actually buy napkins pre-folded like this from Tiger if you want to save time.
I also dressed up the table with a gorgeous display of roses. I chose a single colour of cherry red roses so that the arrangement coordinated with the colour scheme of the table. The bouquet was delivered by Blossoming Gifts on the day by so I simply snipped down the stems until they were the right height to sit inside my acrylic box from Habitat (round plastic fish-bowls from Poundland would work well too). I kept the arrangement low so that we could all see each other over the flowers – there’s nothing worse than having to peer around a bouquet that’s blocking your view at head-height!
Now, on to the personalised Christmas Cracker DIY project. It’s really simple and actually takes hardly any time at all; I simply stuck photos of the dinner guests onto shop-bought crackers. I went on my Facebook and Instagram account to find festive photos of all my friends and printed them directly from the social media sites using the Cheerz app. I wanted small photos to sit in the middle on the cracker so I ordered photo-booth style strips.
When the photos arrived in the post I simply cut out the photos, leaving a white border for a retro Polaroid-esque effect and used double-sided tape to stick this onto red paper. I then used a pair of serrated scissors to cut around the photo mounted on the red paper to create a postage stamp effect. I used a glue gun to stick this to some basic red and white Christmas crackers – but you can use more double-sided sticky tape or glue dots if you prefer. Add some coordinating organza ribbon around the crackers to make them look extra-special. Each guest had their own personalised Christmas cracker and I laid them out around the table which doubled-up as a seating plan. Guests enjoyed finding their photo and keeping the photo from their personalised cracker after they’d pulled it. I also added a few treats to the plates around the table, alongside the personalised Christmas cracker, a candy cane and a party popper. Just a couple of things to keep guests entertained while we’re waiting for dinner to be served. So want do you think of the table setting? What would you include on the table? Let me know by leaving me a comment below!
Some items in this blog post have been gifted to me and the pink links indicate a gifted product, affiliate link or information source. All thoughts and opinions in this post are based on my own experience and I am not responsible for your experience 🙂
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