Holiday Tables

If I’m hosting for Christmas or any other holiday, I spend more time thinking about the table than the menu: much more time. I love setting the table, and once I attain my “vision” we’re all relegated to eating in the kitchen, no matter how many days before the big meal. Here it is, December 22, and I am hosting Christmas dinner and the table is not set! I just finished my grading, however, so I’ll get it together. I have a different animal theme every year for Christmas decorating and some animals are easier than others. Obviously deer are super easy, and I’ve also done bears, foxes, sheep, swans, pheasants, mice and hedgehogs—and more. This year, I chose lions, and they have been challenging! But I do have these great lion placemats which are everything. I’m not quite ready, however, so here’s a succession of holiday tables from both sides of the Atlantic. First we have some Scottish tables from my trip last month, and then a succession of tables from Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, NH: every year they have a Candlelight Stroll among and within their historic houses, featuring a sweeping and colorful view of holidays past.

Scotland: first up are parlor, dining room, and kitchen tables in the Georgian House in Edinburgh’s New Town, owned and operated by the National Trust for Scotland, then a Georgian “everything” room in another National Trust House, Gladstone’s Land. You’re looking at a table, but a lot more is going on in this room–it reminded by of another Georgian room, just below, in the Concord Museum, which I just visited last week. Back in Edinburgh, nothing is more festive than a pub table, and the city is in the midst of major gin craze. The Jolly Botanist is a great gin bar that we really enjoyed.

Back Home (well in Portsmouuth): Strawbery Banke is a museum “neighborhood” of historic houses, some of which were located in the Puddle Dock area of Portsmouth, others which were moved there when the museum was founded in the 1960s. It’s always been a part of my life, as I grew up across the river in southern Maine. The annual Candlelight Stroll features decorated houses with reenactors, representing different periods and stratas of society. The opulent Goodwin Mansion, first up below, was built in 1811, but it is interpreted as an 1870s house. Below its dining room is that of the Chase House, a Georgian structure that is interpreted c. 1818, followed by that of the Rider-Wood House (1830s), the Shapiro House (1919) and the time-capsule 1950s kitchen of the Pridham House.