Episode 3 – Five Easy Ways to Make Your Dinner Table Special

 Hi friends! I’m Karyn, and this is the Family Food for Moms podcast. We’re talking about inspiration for family cooking and dining. 

Today we’re going to talk about five ways to make your table special at mealtimes. Time with our kids and family time is so precious! And with all the stuff going on; outside activities, church, extended family, and just plain work, as well as the work of getting the meal together, it’s hard to find time to be together as a family.

It’s hard for moms to sit down and be present without distractions. I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately for a few other families on top of our other business. I’ve gotten into the bad habit of popping up throughout dinner to check on something or to package food or to do something that I just thought of. It seems like it’s always at the front of my mind. As this goes on, I find we kind of lose the sacredness of dinner time. I really want to make sure that this doesn’t happen. When I sit and relax at the table and I’m really present with my family, it’s so enriching and rewarding. The dinner table is such a great place for family time, as everyone is present and has some food to occupy their minds, and hopefully put them in a good mood. 

So we can set the atmosphere with some beauty on the table, nourishment from the food, and then good conversation and laughter for the soul. We have to guard “together dinner time” carefully if we want it to happen at all, as there’s so much else that wants to pull us away. 

Think about if you’re in a fancy hotel in Paris, looking out the windows. We all love a beautiful view and any kind of beauty enhances the meal experience.  So here are five ways that you can enhance your dinner table. 

I want to talk about practical ways to make your dinnertime special, just to get your imaginations rolling. You do the things that suit you and your family, things that you love, but hopefully this will inspire and encourage you to do that.

So here’s number one: use under plates and layer your plates. Any kind of under plate adds such beauty to the table. We have silver, gold and red under plates, and I love to merely put them under the plates whenever we want to enhance things a little bit. The main plate will go on top of the underplate and then you can layer the other plates that you’ll be using for different courses. Perhaps you’ll have soup, and perhaps you’ll have a starter on a small plate. Then you could put your large dinner plate, your small plate, and then your soup bowl on top, or you could put a side plate on the side for bread and put the soup bowl on top of the main dinner plate. And then underneath those, as I said, is the underplate – gold, or silver, or whatever colour you like. They’re generally made of plastic and they’re a little larger than dinner plates so that you see them sticking out the side.

My youngest daughter loves to set the table for special meals, and I always tell her to put out the gold plates or the silver plates first and then she knows to put the dinner plates on top of those. You can also alternate these plates on the table. Sometimes I put a gold plate for one person, then a red plate for the next one, and then a gold plate again.  

Number two is candles and lights. Lighting is an amazing way to add beauty and interest to the dinner table! We don’t use real candles indoors, but sometimes we use beeswax candles as they’re healthier and don’t give off the  toxic fumes that ordinary candles do. But the problem with beeswax candles is that I generally find them quite expensive, and they melt very fast. So what we’ve done is made use of electronic candles – the little ones with batteries that change colour. They are really pretty. Some of the ones we have are yellow to look like real candles, and some of them have lights that you can set red or blue or green. You can also put them on the setting where they automatically switch through all the different colours of light – it looks really amazing!

Then along with those, I like to put twinkle lights, which are little strings of lights – the sort you can use on a Christmas tree. We put those on the table in the middle, or sometimes around on the walls, but generally they work well winding through other candles and lights that are on the table. I’ve also got a couple of glass jars with silver lids that have twinkle lights inside them. It’s quite easy to do that yourself. If you have a Mason jar and you put a string of twinkle lights inside and then put the lid on, that looks really pretty on the table as well. 

Number three is folding your napkins in a decorative way. There’s many fancy ways of folding napkins. Some work better with paper napkins because they crease better, and some of them work very well with cloth napkins. I personally love to use cloth napkins. We’ve got some deep red ones, some gold ones, some pink ones, and some patterned ones. And depending on how formal the meal is, we’ll choose the colour accordingly.

Check out more ways to fold your Napkins here on our YouTube Channel

I love to use our gold cutlery with the gold napkins. One of the ways I love to fold them is into a rose. It’s quite an easy fold. You just do a roll one way and a roll the other way. To find out how to do these folds, watch the videos above.

We sometimes like to do a little shirt style napkin.  Or you can simply roll it up and put it in the glass. That looks very pretty.  Sometimes we do a fold for a specific event like a Christmas tree for Christmas. Sometimes we like to fold the napkin in a way sp that you can slip the knife and fork into the folded napkin and place it on the centre of your plate. I’m sure there’s many more folds that you can find if you want to go looking. Be creative! 

Now for number four: putting specific place names or messages for each person at their place, or even a little gift.

Sometimes we’ll put a little chocolate at each place. For place names, what I like to do is fold a little flap of cardboard so that it stands up and then write the person’s name on it. Or you could put a little phrase, a Bible verse, a message, or a quote on a little piece of paper at each place, something that suits each person. 

We also have these beautiful crystal name holders, in which you can place the single piece paper containing the name. So you see, there’s many ways you can make this personal for each person. 

Then number five: background music. Music adds such a lovely ambience to  your meal and your dining room.

Choose music for dinner. You can look for soft piano music, or Celtic music –  anything that your family enjoys. Any kind of instrumental is often good because the words can be a bit jarring and distracting. It’s nice to have background music. I really love instrumental music playing, and piano music for dinner. 

We just use our little Bluetooth speaker, put it on the side and use Spotify on our phones to produce the music, and it creates a lovely effect. Play it softly, of course, so that it doesn’t get in the way of your conversation. I find it’s amazing when I have rowdy kids or kids who are feeling very talkative or just a little rambunctious from the day to play soft background music. It always relaxes them, calms them and helps them to be peaceful – this is good for Mom. 

There’s so many other things you can do – you can put flowers or flower arrangements in the centre of your table or along the centre you can lay ivy down the table. You can put a little flower in a napkin at each place at the table. You can use pretty tablecloths, of course, or overlays. Be creative and have fun. Do what you love. And if it feels overwhelming, don’t overthink it. Just spend maybe five minutes before dinner putting out a few special things.  It helps to mention your expectations to your family so they are prepared. Tell them we’re going to have a gentle, quiet dinner. 

The music will help set the mood. Tell them they should put on something special so that they are preparing themselves to enjoy the meal and to respect the time. Perhaps for young kids you can have a couple of items that they can play with with their hands to keep their attention from wandering, and keep them from jumping up from the table. 

But whatever you do, don’t be stressed that it has to be perfect. Don’t worry that it has to be a certain way. The idea is to be close and to enjoy each other’s company, to enjoy being together and enjoy the meal time. So once you’re settled, Don’t have expectations about how you think it should be, and don’t worry about how it turns out. Just enjoy it – relax and enjoy it. Laugh. Have fun.

I’ll talk in another episode about conversation starters that help focus the children’s attention and help them to have good conversation. Also, if you’d like to, you can download our free conversation starters pack with 28 different conversation starters for your family to use at the dinner table to get the conversation going.