Tips to Transform your Dining Room for Thanksgiving

Sarah Tolle – Homify Canada Sarah Tolle – Homify Canada
Willkommen Herbst - die neue Tischwäsche-Kollektion von Sander, Sander Tischwäsche Sander Tischwäsche Comedores de estilo rural Textil Ámbar/Dorado
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Autumn’s most celebrated harvest festival is only a few weeks away, and soon you'll be filling your rooms with a festive feast, friendly faces, and plenty of loved ones. You have probably invited dear friends and family relations, made elaborate plans for a hearty dinner, and even found a couple of new recipes to surprise your guests. However, have you glanced away from your epic holiday menu long enough to examine your setting? It's not too late to transform your dining room into a festive, abundant, and cheerful Thanksgiving space!

For last minute tips and decoration ideas this Thanksgiving, here's an ideabook that will surely inspire you and help you make the best decorating decisions for your own family's occasion. As budget-friendly as they are eye-catching, none of these ideas are going to burn a hole in your pocket, and they're all ideas that yield drastic results quickly (perfect for those last minute holiday fixes that always seem to arise). So often the best part of the holidays is the chance they offer for dressing things up and embellishing your space, so get out those vases, baubles, and table runners, and have at it!

1. Choosing the Right Colour Palette

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Choose a colour scheme that is warm and vibrates with the spirits and atmosphere of the day. You will want to make your guests feel the festive vibes the moment they step into your dining area. For that extra step, you can upholster the chairs in fall colours to tie in well with your theme by getting fabric covers for your chairs (these are temporary tie-on embellishments). 

Other ways you can incorporate festive colours into your dining room landscape:

1. Dress up the windows with curtains in warm colours and lovely motifs, or add a festive garland around the curtain rod.

2. Switch out the cushions with other ones that display more festive colours (perhaps you have some brighter colours in your living room or bedroom?).

3. Install a lamp with matching shades at the corner of the room, or bring a lamp from another area of the home that won't be host to guests (bedroom, for example) and use it to bring warmth to your dining room. 

4. Find a soft rug with a warm tone or rustic pattern to add a bit of earthy familiarity to your dining room.

With all these tips, y our dining room colour scheme should resonate with the joyful spirit of the moment!

2. Dress up your walls

The ambience of any of your rooms depends heavily on how you embellish your walls. If you have already given it a makeover with an extra coat of paint or covered it with wallpapers in animated designs, then all the better: Thanksgiving is all about abundance. To do this on the cheap, you can use plants, flowers and leaves from your own backyard to deck out your walls with natural elements that suit the season. You can also simple relocate your potted plants from the deck to the interior for the day in order to bring more abundant plant life into the dining area. If you have enough time in advance, consider growing or buying a few pots of fresh herbs – not only are they beautiful and decorative, they'll create deliciously fresh Thanksgiving dishes as well!

 This dining room also features a unique light fixture that clearly emphasizes the dining-centric focus of the room – a series of green and brown glass bottles that have been refashioned to accommodate a lightbulb in each one. If you don't have time to create an elaborate fixture like this one, you can still create hearty and welcoming centerpieces with old glass bottles, forming a display of recycled vases in the middle of the table whose greens and browns suit the nature of the festive occasion perfectly.

Looking for more ways to upgrade your decor? Have a glance at this ideabook: Easy Ways to Make your Home Decor Soar

3. Use colourful dinnerware

This Thanksgiving, bring out your most colourful crockery – for creating holiday cheer, the brighter the better. The set on display is designed by Maruhiro Inc., and it uses almost all the available shades of a spectrum without creating a childlike rainbow vibe. Dinnerware sets in bold colours, floral patterns or elaborate natural motifs will all work well on holiday occasions, where it's perfectly okay to go a little overboard when it comes to elaboration and embellishment. 

Alternatively, rustic wooden and earthen dinnerware also looks stunning and feels appropriate with the spirits of Thanksgiving if you're going for a more hearty, rustic approach. So often, the wooden spoons or wooden bowls get stashed away in the back of the cabinet, as you don't want to ruin these artisan pieces by staining them over time – Thanksgiving is a great reminder to bring out these pieces for your guests to enjoy the warmth and natural tones that they provide.

4. Fill your table with life

Dinner usually doesn't happen right away – often guests spend time talking, sipping wine, having a snack, or helping out in the kitchen for hours before the meal actually starts. That said, your table has plenty of room beforehand to accommodate a lively and abundant display before it gets pushed aside for holiday dishes and clanking utensils. 

Use small sculptures, a bowl of fruits and nuts, flowers, candles, and potted plants to embellish it. It's Thanksgiving, with a spirit of generosity, so don't be afraid to create a varied centerpiece that includes a generous assortment of multiple decorative elements. Consider the scents and sensual aspect of your centerpiece as well – the subtle scents of lavender, rosemary and pine tend to enrich the holiday atmosphere, adding to the mouth-watering scents wafting from the kitchen nearby. Flowers or colourful leaves collected from the garden can be woven into a wreath or garland and placed on the table. This is a great project for kids to participate, not to mention it's a solution that can be done on a dime.

This example uses a variety flowers in glass globes to embellish the centre stage of a dining table, creating a more modern take on the centerpiece bouquet. However, if you still retain some of the old handcrafted artifacts that  have been passed down through your family, this is the perfect occasion for bringing them out and incorporating them into your table's design. They'll make for great conversation pieces, allowing family members of all ages to share in their unique history.

5. Table linens

No holiday table décor can be fully complete without due consideration for table linen, runners and placemats! This is one of the easiest ways to dress things up – it's temporary, inexpensive, and extremely easy to customize, as there are so many options out there. Those with a knack of knitting and weaving can create their own DIY mats in elaborate patterns, and if you'd like to offer your guests a gift to take home, these knitted decorations can be the perfect solution. 

That said, as you're filling your table with all of those linens, remember when to hold off – if you've got a rustic wooden table like this one, don't hide it under a tablecloth! This sturdy piece of furniture makes a lovely statement for a Thanksgiving dinner, and with a simple table runner gracing the center of the tabletop, the structure and material of the table is still permitted to shine through, establishing a comforting country cottage atmosphere.

6. Use candles for a warm and inviting ambience

No festive occasion could be fulfilled without an inclusion of an age old favourite – candles. Traditional pillar candles or colourful taper candles can be placed on the center of the table, at a corner of the room (conveniently out of the way of busy foot traffic!), or over the mantelpiece. Floating candles and flowers suspended in a glass container full of water can be a nice addition as well, and it's a great option for hosts who have small children running around, as the floating candles are safely surrounded by a container of water.

Looking to make some more changes to your dining room setup before guests arrive? Get inspiration from this ideabook, with simple designs for dramatic dining rooms!

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