In fact, it falls flat. Maybe it’s because I sat two fall seasons out, but my inspiration well is as dry as the leaf pile. So, in a quest for ideas to spice up my fall table, I turned to Sur La Table (surlatable.
com), the entertaining and tableware retailer that has been encouraging customers to cook well and entertain often since it opened its first store 50 years ago. “I need a fall-iday refresher,” I said, when I got Natalie Rodgers, Sur La Table’s senior director of merchandising for the entertaining division, on the phone. “In normal times,” she said, “the second half of the year is when hosts start to elevate their dining tables, and make the everyday more formal.
But this year, people are more excited than ever to gather and are ready to pull out all the stops.” “This presumes I have stops to pull,” I said. “That doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy anything new,” Rodgers said.
“You can use what you have and what is in your backyard, as well as look at what’s in store.” All that sounds grand. However, before you start running around like a turkey with your, err, uhh, before you get too carried away, heed this: It’s really easy to make a fall table look like a pumpkin-pilgrim mashup.
Turkey-themed plates next to pumpkin-print napkins wedged into napkin rings crafted to look like pilgrim hats all spread on a tablecloth dusted with fall leaves can look like yesterday’s giblet stuffing. So, to help you (and me) proceed tastefully, I a.
