Happy New Year to everyone! I take the appearance of a full super moon on New Years Day to be a favorable omen for 2018.
I am now preparing to take up my post-holiday life and looking forward to starting some new projects, but must also look back to a very happy Christmas. My sons and their partners and Mike's brother and his wife joined us for dinner so we were eight around the table. Last Christmas I received a beautiful winter runner wilth gold-edged napkins from my daughter-in-law as a present and I have been thinking all year about how I would use them. In the summer I found linen whose color matched the pine cones on the runner exactly and I bought enough to make an undercloth. I imagined a centerpiece of pine boughs and cones and wondered about spray-painting them gold, but when I got the undercloth hemmed and put the runner on top of it I decided it didn't need anything but the gold candleholders I found when I was Christmas shopping for other people. (Furious internal argument about whether I should be buying stuff for myself, but fortunately, I won.)
Plain off-white plates were too plain by themselves so I had a chance to use the vintage gold-edged salad plates we got years ago from Mike's grandmother. The wine glasses were also vintage....my sister gave them to me in their original box.... the gold edged pilsner glasses with the cut facets on the base looked good with them even though they are very different in age and weight. I folded the napkins so the gold lace wouldn't be lost at the edge of the table and tucked the forks inside. All set for a jolly holiday dinner!