Chart Your Seating

Thursday morning comes quickly out of the dark, and with it the promise of the Thanksgiving feast. Have you set the table yet? You should. Set it as if for a sacrament. The Thanksgiving meal is America's most holy secular ritual."There are three things that people pick up on the instant they walk into your home on Thanksgiving," said Danny Meyer, the New York restaurateur, who does not celebrate the holiday at Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, North End Grill or any of his other considerable number of restaurants, but always with family at home. "They will be able to feel the human energy. They'll smell the food. And they will see, instantly, the table. The combination - if you're in a good mood, and you've taken time with the table, and the turkey is cooking - sends a message that, no matter what, everything is going to be OK."Get that table done early so you're not in a rush right before the guests arrive, bickering with family or friends. Admire it a little, and make tweaks to serve your mood. Start with a tablecloth. "Anything goes," Letitia Baldrige wrote in 1978 in her revision of "Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette," first published in 1952 and still a cornerstone of proper behavior before, during and after formal meals. "Hostesses are using fashion-designer sheets as tablecloths, combining them with coordinating solid-color napkins. Our grandmothers would have fainted."Use what you have, ironed if you can manage it, and work from there. (Some will use a pad beneath the cloth, to add a formal restaurant-like feel under the forearm.) You can lay a runner down the center of the table, in a contrasting color or fabric. Ned Martel, a Los Angeles television writer who used to be the Style editor of The Washington Post, encourages the commingling of the monogrammed and the mass-produced. "Put an olive-drab cloth from the surplus store across Nana's Irish lace," he said.The point is to make the best of what is available to you. Martel paraphrased the hostess and composer Mary Rodgers Guettel, "We needn't stand on ceremony, but let's not live like pigs." Set out chairs for your guests. They need not match. But they should be arranged thoughtfully, so that they offer a visual balance between the ones you usually use and the ones you unfolded from the garage or borrowed from the neighbors or dragged out from the children's room.How close together are they? "People actually get somewhat larger and require even more space over the course of a Thanksgiving meal," said Meyer, suggesting that you take a moment to sit in them, enlisting another to sit alongside you, making sure there is actually room for all.No room? Tables may join other tables, or a plywood sheet and sawhorses may be deployed. This wreaks havoc on the tablecloth game. But that is why you set a table early. You may need to improvise.Plates and silverware and glasses do not have to match, anymore than the chairs. But if you have good stuff, put it out. "That's what it was made for," said Bryan Batt, the actor and designer who runs the Hazelnut décor shop in New Orleans. "Its sole purpose was to make dining more beautiful and elegant. Nothing ever had fun sitting on a shelf." So one setting gets an old family plate and some flatware from the big-box store. The next gets a plate from there and silverware from Grandma. Martel: "Polished copper, meet rust! Stemware, say hey to Mason jars." The rules are simple. Each person needs a plate, and at least a knife and a fork, a water glass and a vessel for wine, and a napkin, which really should be cloth if you can manage it. Why cloth? "It sets the stage that dinner is going to be extra special," Meyer said. Batt, for his part, pointed out that cloth napkins may be acquired at many different prices and at whatever cost will pay dividends at many dinners to come. (You can get a dozen cotton napkins for around $25 at the big box, and have them for 10 years or more.)Fold the napkins carefully, though as Baldrige pointed out, channeling Vanderbilt, "simplicity is most appropriate" in a formal setting like Thanksgiving. A simple rectangle, folded to the left so that the cloth's spine is facing right, should be placed on a bare plate or beneath the fork to its left. The knife goes on the plate's right side, its blade facing left to indicate a lack of aggression toward one's tablemate to the right. The spoon sits to the right of the knife. Above the knife, toward the center of the table, place a water glass and at least one for wine, more if you have the glasses and many different varietals are in store for the feast.You'll need some condiments out there as well. Meyer suggests one salt-and-pepper service (small wooden bowls do nicely) for every six guests, along with bowls of cranberry sauce, gravy boats, butter dishes and, for some, small bottles of hot sauce. "This makes it so much easier to pass," he said.Decorate the table carefully. Small gourds and low flowers are nice. Some families deploy trinkets that evoke the fall. Candles are an excellent touch. "Everyone looks so much better in candlelight," Batt said. But use nothing scented, which would compete with the smell of the turkey, and avoid tall tapers, which act as an obstacle to one of the feast's most pressing needs: eye contact between all.Enlist children or the artistic to make simple place cards, the Thanksgiving host's best friends. Place cards allow for deft social engineering at the table, putting buffers between family members who argue and guests of different political stripes, and offering the opportunity to seat the gregarious next to the shy, to the benefit of the entire table.Will you pass platters at the table when it comes to the feast? Do a test run with bare ones to make sure there's room for them and, if not, clear space nearby for a sideboard. Will you play music during the meal? "If you're a bunch of 20-somethings, new to town and away from your families, music might be just the thing," Meyer said. "If you're four generations of a family, 8 months to 80 years, you might not need it. Think about it ahead of time, and make your playlists accordingly. You don't need the stress on the day itself."Now all that's left is to pour water before everyone sits down to eat. You can place open bottles of wine up and down the spread as well. What you want from your finished table, Martel said, is a sense of the magical and unexpected, that anything could happen this glorious Thanksgiving Day. "Let the thought cross every mind," he said. "'Is this going to get weird?'"© 2014 New York Times News Service