Golden Cornhusk Thanksgiving

It’s still November. That means you still want the re-cap of our lovely Thanksgiving dinner, and aren’t totally absorbed in Christmas preparations, right? Wrong? Well, humor me anyway. I was so pleased with how things turned out that I have been very excited to share with you.

I didn’t host Thanksgiving. We went to my husband’s grandparent’s house, but they are both in poor health, so it took several of us providing food to create this meal. Originally my Mother-in-law had thought to go really simple by using paper plates and such, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to create a beautiful tablescape, especially when my friend Laura from Pink Cake Plate, offered to let me pillage her supply of beautiful white dishes and gold chargers in lieu of the paper goods.

We had 16 adults plus several small children, so the plan was to eat outside. Grandmother and Grandad have a couple of rustic picnic tables and I figured the best way to make this feel like a special meal was to push the tables together to create one large table. I felt like tableclothes would be too formal (except for the lovely one Laura let us borrow, that turned an old ping-pong table into a serving table, and knew I wanted to leave much of the wood table exposed for this meal.

I made table runners to go across the table out of rolls of painters paper. Easy and super cheap. I also used the paper to cover the kids table.

Initially I had a different plan for centerpieces, but as it was, there was barely room enough for everyones goblets. I placed a few of these vintage gold candleholders in the spaces that weren’t occupied by glasses.

My first plan was to line the length of the tables with these gold vases that I made from old jars and thrifted vases. (Let’s pretend those drips were intentional).

To create the gold-dipped effect, I taped of the top of each jar, often at an angle, and spray-painted the vases with a pretty shimmery gold paint.

I taped off stripes on the square vase. I picked up a couple of bunches of inexpensive daisies from the grocery store and put a couple of blooms in each vase. The vases then lined the back of the serving table since there wasn’t room on the table. I borrowed the rest of the serving table decor from my Thanksgiving mantle.

I thought the vintage high chair they pulled out for my niece was so cute, and went well with the rest of the decor.

I made a banner using the Free Thanksgiving printables from The TomKat studio. The simple design was just what I was going for and saved me all that time it would have taken to come up with my own.

I recycled my cornhusk poms that you might have noticed in the Thanksgiving Preschool celebration, to frame the banner.

I came up with a fun way to tie-in the corn husks with the centerpieces. And what makes it better, they are edible!

I made “indian corn” treats, by making rice crispie treats with a combination of Kix cereal and Cocoa Puffs (mostly Kix with a smaller amount of Cocoa Puffs).

I used buttered sandwich bags over my hands to help me shape the corn treats. After they were set-up I wrapped them in corn husks like the kind you can buy in the grocery store to make tamales (at least in Arizona).

I made the name cards out of the TomKat Studio printable set and tied them with twine on to each ear of corn.

And incase that wasn’t enough cuteness, I made some of these apple turkey tarts (inspired by these ones at MirandaMade), as part of the dessert  selection.

It was a lovely meal.  Good food. Good company. But the very best part came before we left when Grandmother, with tears in her eyes, thanked me for making the meal so special, and for doing what she wasn’t able to do any more by creating a beautiful atmosphere for our meal. I don’t think I could have anticipated what my efforts would mean to her. Life is too short to just go through the motions.

I like the above picture because it shows how Grandmother had set aside the place card corn treats I had made for her and Grandad, because she wanted to save them for a while, and it just seemed fitting that they were side-by-side.

Thanks for letting me share! I would love to hear about your Thanksgiving! Any memorable moments? What did you do to make it a special day?