A Few Easy Budget Ideas For Styling Your Christmas Table

How to use what you've already got, getting creative and trawling the thrift shops to lay a beautiful table that won't cost you loads of money.

I come from a family of obsessive table decorators.  Both my Mum, my sister, Annabel and my sister in law, Natasha, are of what can only be described as Olympic standard when it comes to styling any table that is to be used for a group meal, Christmas or otherwise.  The often mooted idea of simply chucking a table mat, cutlery and a bottle of Heinz on the table is met with what can only described as abject horror.  In the Kerman family, a celebratory table has a high benchmark and you have to be in it to win it.  Competition is stiff - both my sister Annabel and sister in law Natasha work in fashion and are super chic and my own transient decorating style was inherited from my Mum - so there's no halfway house.  It's all or nothing.  If your fully set table doesn't get at least a gasp of awe, then you must consider yourself a failure.

Over the years, my family have pushed the table decorating boundaries.  My Mum always did a traditional Christmas table - red tablecloth, holly, napkins and a huge candelabra with red candles that used to grandly sit in the centre.  The crackers were always the most exciting part, although we always waited for our main course to finish before we pulled them.  I'm sure that in those days the prizes inside were much more fun - nowadays it seems as if the more expensive your crackers are, the more boring the present.  As a man with a larger than average head, Joe always struggles with the paper hats as most of cracker manufacturers appear to size them on a small child.  

Party poppers were also an essential and pulled at the same time - my parents had a big chandelier in the middle of the room that we used to aim at and it was family tradition that the streamers stayed there until the twelfth night.   We'd sit around the table for hours and hours, drinking wine, glugging Baileys, Amaretto and eating Elizabeth Shaw mints whilst smoking copious Silk Cut (these were the 1980's).  By the time that we were all trollied, we'd moved on to Walnuts, a game which is another family tradition that came from my Dad's side of the family - it basically involves grabbing the nuts as fast as you can and which almost always ends with someone being gravely injured.  Such fun.

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