Styling a Christmas Table

I am sure you have already seen some of your favourite bloggers' Christmas tables, beautifully decorated for the 12 Styled Days of Christmas in collaboration with West Elm.  Well today it is my turn! When I think about a Christmas table, I usually picture loads of green foliage, a few candles and most importantly plenty of food!  But I thought this year, I would try something different from the greenery, so I headed up to the Brighton flower market, ideas whizzing around my head.  However, when I got there, my plans were completely scuppered.  They didn't have any hydrangeas! I had been planning on going totally hydrangea crazy, I had a mental image of hydrangeas everywhere.  Now what was I going to do?  I considered sneaking over to the house opposite where they have a rather impressive specimen growing in their front garden.  But decided against it, firstly because I didn't want to get arrested, and secondly I think they might have noticed if every flower head had been removed.

My choices were pretty limited, Brighton Flower Market is no Covent Garden!  There isn't really much variety, and my taste differs quite considerably to all the other buyers it seems.  But all was not lost, I found a couple of pretty things, astrantia, berried eucalyptus and antirrhinum,  it seemed I was destined to return to my usual form of keeping it simple.  Before heading home, I popped up to Devils Dyke and grabbed myself a few seed-heads too, I have a little bit of a thing about using them in arrangements lately.

When we are at home for Christmas, we usually have a full house for lunch, we like it that way.  Even when I was heavily pregnant with Dottie, I still insisted right up until the last minute, that we could host, until I realised I wouldn't be able to bend down and reach the oven.  But this year, it will be a bit quieter, which means we won't have to cram two mismatched tables into the dining room.  So with a bit of extra space, and my original plans falling by the wayside, I decided to do something very simple, that can be done easily by anyone, using any different flowers.

I wanted a softer look for our dining room table, so I started by covering it with a linen bed sheet from West Elm (who needs a table cloth when a sheet works just as well), before going on to arrange the flowers.  To call this a tutorial would be pushing it, but I just cut a piece of each flower and put it in a jar, and then repeated until I had filled all of my jam jars with flowers.  Each stem, cut at different heights for interest, and using differing amounts, so every jar was individual.  Once that was done, I placed them together in the centre of the table for impact, because in this case, more is more!

To finish the table, I styled each plate with a stem of astrantia and a stem of eucalyptus, added some grey ceramic plates, vintage cutlery, West Elm wine glasses, and voila, a simple but pretty table arrangement.

You can see how everyone else has styled their Christmas tables, on Front+Main with West Elm, on The Lovely Drawer, or by searching #mywestelm and #kindredspirits on social media.

Emma x

Disclosure - A gift card was provided by West Elm to pay for their items used in this post.  But all content, photos and opinions are my own.