Thanksgiving Table Setting - Sideboard

Christina Haire: HiI! I am Christina Haire. I am an interior designer and today, I am showing you how to set a Thanksgiving table and it's important to set the sideboard too. The sideboard will hold the serving pieces for our Thanksgiving dinner, but it's also one another opportunity for a visual display and on our sideboard we use some traditional elements always for Thanksgiving that we have collected over the years. There is always a ceramic turkey that holds the mashed potatoes for some strange reason, but that's our tradition.

In addition to our turkey, that's traditional every year, we have a ceramic rabbit which is also called a hare in honor of our family and we use that as a serving piece. In the center of all this is a silver plate dome which is a traditional piece that covers the joint as they used to say in England or in this case, our turkey. It will sit on a large iron stone platter and once the turkey is carved and served, it will keep it warm. There also will be a silver plate cake basket which is also English and will hold the breads and the muffins and we will have an antique Victorian water pitcher for serving and as our display element, we have a couple of candle sticks, candelabra that will light, as well as an arrangement of fall leaves. I collected these leaves yesterday and as you can see they still look very fresh. I just cut low branches from the trees that are especially colorful around my house and it's a very good thing to do because you can, as they dry, you can keep them for the whole season and as they dry, they shrink a bit. So I keep adding more and more leaves until -- as a shrunken bouquet it has the same effect as it did when it was very fresh.

If you have an already, it is a good time for you to start your own Thanksgiving traditions. It's something that children really look forward to even when they are all grown up like mine. That's how we set the sideboard for our traditional family Thanksgiving dinner and next, I will show you how we lay the table.