How to Style Your Holiday Dining Table 3 Ways!

This post is sponsored by Target. All photos and text in this post are copyrighted by Soiree Event Design and may NOT be copied from this site and used in any way without permission from the owner. Pinning images, of course, is allowed and encouraged. Hey, party peeps! The holiday season is in full swing, and I, for one, have a to-do list a mile long! To keep from going crazy during the holidays, I am always trying to come up with ways to save time and money and still be able to do what I love—throw amazing dinner parties and entertain with my family and friends! Today, I’m going to show How To Style Your Holiday Dining Table 3 Ways quickly and easily using my Girlfriend Tips! This is the season for entertaining and hosting dinner in your home. It can be overwhelming and costly to transform your dining table completely for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Here, I’m going to show you how to transform your fall dining table to Thanksgiving and Christmas by just swapping and reusing a few items—some of which I actually used in my Halloween Dining Table design. These staple items, such as black candleholders, gold candles, white dinnerware and gold flatware can really carry you through the entire holiday season.

BEGIN WITH A FALL TABLESCAPE!

I have a huge table in my dining room, and I love to keep it decorated all year and then switch out the decorations for each season or holiday. This fall, I wanted the dining table to have a neutral rustic-glam design. Since my table is already a dark brown, it was the perfect base for the white, gold and silver colors I used for the decorations. While shopping at Target, I fell in love with their new Nordic collection of holiday and home decor, and I picked up a few items like these champagne glittered trees, shimmery champagne garland, shiny metallic silver candleholders and an ivory table runner with gold metallic threads running throughout. To add a modern touch to the table, I found these all-white fox salt and pepper shakers that I displayed on the table as decorations that will serve a purpose when it’s time to host your holiday dinners! To finish the table, I used the silver chargers that I already have displayed on my table year-round and the black candleholders, gold candles and gold flatware that I picked up for my Halloween dining table last month. When I decorate my table for a specific season, like fall, I don’t display full place settings, as the items get dusty and seriously, who’s got time to be dusting eight place settings? NOT ME. GIRLFRIEND TIP: DON’T BE AFRAID TO MIX METALS! I love mixing gold and silver metallics together in a design. Using a champagne color, like I did here, with the trees and garland really softens the look and blends the gold and silver together in a cohesive and soft way. Ready for a serious time-saver tip? The garland I displayed around the base of the silver metallic candles is really 6-foot garland that is intended to stretch across a mantle. Since they came wound up like this (and they stayed wound even when I cut off the tag) with an empty space in the middle, they were perfect just sitting on the table as-is with a candle placed in the middle!

TRANSFORM YOUR FALL TABLE FOR THANKSGIVING DINNER!

The holidays are busy enough, right? Transforming your fall table into a fancy Thanksgiving table is as simple as adding a full place setting like I did here. It’s super easy and takes literally minutes to set up. Layering your place settings with mixed metals and pops of white and gold adds the perfect amount of glam to transform your table for guests. Thanksgiving is usually a fancier dinner with multiple courses, so for this I like to include a full dinner setup, including these fabulous gold-and-white bowls and salad plates from the Nate Berkus line at Target (totally obsessed with him!). GIRLFRIEND TIP: Adding place cards to your table instantly creates a dinner-party vibe. Use place-card holders that match your theme, like these birch-log place-card holders. AND, to create a pop of color between the bowl, salad plate and dinner plate, I put a gold metallic paper plate! I know, I know…a paper plate on a fancy Thanksgiving table! But look how fabulous it looks, and you will have spent literally a few dollars on a pack of plates that added a huge visual impact to the table!

TRANSFORM YOUR THANKSGIVING TABLE FOR CHRISTMAS DINNER!

As soon as you’re all done with decorating for Thanksgiving, here comes Christmas right around the corner! Keep your stress level to a minimum, concentrate on one decor element (here, I chose to focus on modern reindeer) and follow my Girlfriend Tips below on how to transform your Thanksgiving table for Christmas dinner! The first rule: Keep your color palette the same so you can reuse most of your table decor, like the candleholders, gold candles, and silver candles with the shiny champagne garland. GIRLFRIEND TIP #1: SWAP OUT YOUR TABLE RUNNER! I fell in love with Target’s silver-and-white snowflake runner. The colors matched my existing table decor but the pattern was specific to Christmas to give the table a holiday vibe. Using runners is an inexpensive way to change the look of your table instead of using a full tablecloth. GIRLFRIEND TIP #2: SWAP OUT YOUR FALL DECOR WITH CHRISTMAS DECOR PIECES! This was super simple. I just swapped out the foxes with white modern reindeer to give the table a holiday feel. I also added a pop of golden glam by adding this amazing gold reindeer head I found in Target. It’s actually a jewelry holder, but now it is the wow-factor centerpiece I needed to transform the table from fall to winter! GIRLFRIEND TIP #3: SWAP OUT YOUR PLACE-CARD HOLDERS! It doesn’t get any easier than this. Just use a set of place-card holders that match your Christmas theme. Keeping with my modern-reindeer table theme, I used these awesome white reindeer-antler place-card holders and then glammed them up by adding these metallic place cards that I found in the holiday section of Target. GIRLFRIEND TIP #4: REMOVE THE FULL PLACE SETTING! Christmas dinner in my house isn’t as fancy a meal as our Thanksgiving dinner, so I removed the salad and soup bowls and simply topped the white plates with yet another paper plate! This one is so fabulous! It’s a gold metallic snowflake! It’s the perfect pop of color needed for the place setting, and it worked perfectly with the gold flatware. Reuse the silver chargers, gold flatware and white dinner plates to keep expenses down.

ARE YOU HOSTING THANKSGIVING OR CHRISTMAS DINNER THIS YEAR? WHAT TIPS DO YOU HAVE TO TRANSFORM YOUR TABLES?

Find your style @targetstyle

WHERE DID SHE GET THAT?

– Styling and photography: Soiree Event Design – All holiday decor, plates, cutlery, glasses, bowls, candles and candleholders: Target

WANT MORE HOLIDAY INSPIRATION?

Check out my CHRISTMAS PINTEREST BOARD full of holiday party and decor ideas! Follow Soiree Event Design’s board Christmas Inspiration on Pinterest.