Hello! Thanksgiving is next week and I’m ready to celebrate. We won’t have a large crowd. Our daughter and husband are in Japan. (Air Force) And our son is at college and probably won’t make it here until Christmas. So it might be just the two of us. But … my husband built a new dining table so at least we can eat “up front” and not in the breakfast room.
Since I helped him stain and paint the table, it will always have special meaning to me. We owned another table that moved with us from place to place. But when we moved to Florida, we finally sold that one. It was special too. It was Early American and my husband bought the entire set of table and six chairs as a surprise Christmas gift for me when we’d only been married a couple of years. I have to confess the design wasn’t my first choice but I didn’t make him take it back. He had ordered it from a Georgia furniture store where he worked during high school and had it shipped to a friend’s apartment near us in Atlanta. On Christmas Eve, he had a plan to sneak it onto our apartment patio that night and bring it inside our tiny dining room so I’d see it first thing in the morning. He started moving it in the dark before we went to bed but … it started raining. So he had to bring it in and surprise me early. Because he’d gone to so much trouble, I could have never sent it all back. So I decorated that table and served many meals on it. It went to a good home. Now I have a new table, built by hand and I had a hand in finishing it, too. It’s new but with an old feel. We ordered chairs to go around it and now we’re ready to seat eight! Come on down!
The whole point of this is to say that a table becomes more than just a place to sit and eat. It holds memories in each grain of the wood. It holds hope in each prayer said over it. It hold food for our bodies and nourishment for our souls. I will cherish this table as much as I cherished the one I had before and I’ll try to make new memories and say grace over good food on this table, beginning with our first Thanksgiving in this house. What does your dining table say to you? What memories do you hold dear when you gather around your dining table? I still have tags to remove on some of these chairs but come Thanksgiving, this table will look as if it belongs here. And isn’t that what a table is all about? Having a place in life, surrounded by love? Whether it’s two or twenty, I wish you a great Thanksgiving and I hope your table has one more guest–The Lord! I’ll be thanking him for all his many blessings!
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What a beautiful table! And I love the idea that the grains of wood hold every prayer prayed around that table, every memory made there. Our son made a similar table for his family, and you can almost feel the love that’s gone into it both during the building and since. Prayers for a wonderful Thanksgiving—even if it’s just the two of you.
Thank you, Deb!!
I’ll never see my table as “ordinary” again. Thanks, Lenora.
Extraordinary!! That can be a good topic at the table, Lynn!!
Thank you for helping me recall the journey of our dining table. We bought this table in 1972 from a furniture store in North Carolina. It is oval, made of pecan wood, has six chairs, a leaf to expand it, and we purchased a beautiful China cabinet to go with it. It moved with us to Virginia Beach in 1975, my husband’s last duty station and where we decided to stay upon his retirement from the Marine Corps in 1979. After spending 18 years in our first home here, we moved it to the home we built in 1993, and here it still stands.
Over the years it has been the center of every holiday dinner, special occasion, and Sunday dinner while we were raising our children and when other relatives visited. After 20 years my mother helped me recover the chairs with a beautiful silk brocade material. One Christmas season, after saying goodbye to the last guests of the evening, we walked back in the house to begin cleanup, and found a fire in the middle of the table. The centerpiece had burst into flames and was fortunately doused when my husband threw a large pan of water over it. We then had the top of the table refinished. Now, during the week, my granddaughter and I sit at the table for a quiet place to do homework.
Like you, Lenora, my family has scattered and my parents passed on. With a daughter and grandson in California, we will celebrate Thanksgiving at our table with our son and granddaughter who live here. My sister and nephew will drive down from Richmond for the day, as we try to keep our traditions with as much family as we can gather and give thanks for all of our blessings. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
What a beautiful history, Betty! Thank you so much for sharing! Happy Thanksgiving.
We recently gave our dining table a make-over. After many years of use it was looking worn and outdated. Instead of purchasing new, we put brand new legs on it then sanded the whole thing and stained it. Well… my husband did all that. Not me. 🙂 It looks wonderful!
We’ve shared so many celebratory meals around that table! Halloween dinners, birthday dinners, Thanksgiving feasts, Christmas morning breakfasts, Valentine breakfasts, Easter breakfasts. Now the table will see many, many more.
Becky, that is great. I still miss the table we gave away but I have to admit this one grabbed my heart. And we had fun working on it together. Plus, it got my husband back into woodworking, something that seems to be an inherited tradition in his family. I have cabinets and small items made by his father. His grandfather was also a handy man. My husband also made me a hat rack from crape myrtle branches. I’ll have to show that off when it’s finished. 🙂
Your new dining room table is beautiful and well made and the chairs go great with it! I hope that you have a good Thanksgiving . Even if it’s just you and your husband. Don and I will be alone that day too. My daughter, a RN will be on duty that day and my granddaughter will be going to her boyfriends parents so it’s just the two of us.
Fancy that! We’ve been working on a table too. A neighbor gave us an old one that had major cosmetic issues and a few structural problems, so I spent the last couple weeks sanding down the top and staining and refinishing it. It’s beautiful! And the structural issues are almost fixed–just have to drill some more holes in the boards that connect the legs to the top, and then we can put it back together!