This was such a strange Christmas season, as illness dissolved one celebratory plan after another. The last event on the schedule, a dinner here with our cherished friends from our old neighborhood, was the only one that actually took place. We knew ahead of time that we wouldn't be able to meet before Christmas, so we made this January date in early December. By the time it arrived I was ready for a party.
Even though it felt like I had lots of time to prepare, I still got caught a little flat-footed, having let everything slide. The Christmas decorations I had managed before the flu struck me down were now dusty and tired, and I never got around to any table setting at all. For this table I decided Christmas had had its day and set out to find some simple flowers that still suggested winter and festivity. Nothing caught my fancy until I saw the bags of little mandarin oranges in the produce department at the store. I love the ones that still have the leaves on and even though these didn't, I figured I could fake it with salal leaves from the woods.
The runner is yet another wool scarf from Asian Eye, our local importer. (They have two wonderful clearance events each year, which I never miss. They provide such a resource for beautiful, yet cheap, table linens.) I thought the white pattern on the blue and purple background of this scarf looked snowy, thus winter perfect. Citrus always offers us Northerners a bit of exotic cheer here in our gray doldrums and I tried to evoke that contrast by using gray dishes and etched glassware to match the weather outside.
The activity of the pattern on the runner and the brightness of the fruit seemed like enough incident for this table, but in the pictures it doesn't seem like enough. This is one of my challenges as I go forward...how to get the proportions of things right.