This Christmas dinner was the biggest one I have done yet, with all of my family here this year, plus Vu’s family.  I had to get a little table to add to the end to fit everyone.  I absolutely loved everything this year.  I saw this table runner in January and loved it, so I have been waiting pretty much all year to use it.  I bought the fabric from Spoonflower and sewed it myself.  Then I watercolor painted some flowers as similar to the runner as I could get and scanned them in to make clip art for the name tags and menu’s.  I think I got it pretty close… 🙂  I found 2 different kinds of these little cardboard houses on Amazon and used white puff paint to make them look like little gingerbread houses (I got the idea from Cherie’s Instagram, but from last year) and then just placed some different sizes of birch wood rounds down the table and stacked some candles and votive’s around them.  Then I finished it off with some fresh flowers in coordinating colors and added some pomegranates and cranberries.  Getting the flowers was definitely the hardest part, trying to get all of the right colors, but they make the whole thing just so beautiful!  I loved the bright vibrant Christmas colors so much!  I made sure to use shorter vases this time around, because the last 3 dinners my mom keeps removing them so she can talk to people across the table, which I do not like…

For the food… I got the seasoned rib roast from Costco.  The potatoes are an old favorite.  The french onion tart was new and a definite winner but I just used puff pastry instead of making the dough.  The Provencal tomatoes and cucumber salad were fine, but not worth repeating and my mom and dad made the squash, green beans and salad.  I made a lemon gingerbread cake but I accidentally dried it out, and I mean like really dry, so I didn’t like it that much.   My family said it was good though.  I also don’t know why I ever try something other than chocolate… whenever I eat a cake that isn’t chocolate I think “why aren’t you chocolate…?” so I should have just stuck with that…  I had some other technical difficulties with it as well, I was supposed to refrigerate the cake after making the layers so the lemon curd could stiffen up a bit and the cake wouldn’t move all over the place when frosting, but on my cake stand it was just 1/2 an inch too tall to fit in my fridge so I just went for it and it definitely moved all over the place so the lemon curd escaped a bit… but I still think it was really pretty.