Create beautiful holiday centerpieces at home.
Decorations can create the first impression for guests attending your gathering. From Christmas dinner to a wedding reception, centerpieces adorning tables set the celebratory scene. Adding personal touches to centerpieces by making them yourself will add to the excitement and emotion of your gathering and get your guests ready for the celebration.
Wedding Centerpieces
Most wedding receptions feature a centerpiece at each table, and homemade pieces add a personal and emotional touch for every guest.
Lights commonly adorn wedding centerpieces. Wrap flower bouquets with white twinkle lights to add sparkle. Some lights are designed to operate underwater, and placing one of these lights at the bottom of a vase of flowers can add a new highlight to leaves and stems.
Instead of manufactured lighting, prepare a centerpiece that features the soft lighting of candlelight. Float small candles in crystal bowls filled with water. Adorn the bottom of these bowls with colorful stones or marbles that will reflect the candlelight. Alternately, wrap these bowls with baby's breath or other traditional wedding flowers, but be careful to keep the plants away from the floating flames.
Reunion Centerpieces
Whether you're celebrating a family reunion or a graduation reunion with old friends, memory lane may be the destination for your centerpieces.
Make copies out of old yearbooks or from baby photos of guests that you know are coming to the reunion. You may want to double check with the people you pick to make sure they don't mind having their pictures displayed. Place the pictures in inexpensive frames that you decorate with memories from the eras of your reunion: miniature records, roller skates and other fond memories. Include with each frame centerpiece a note or decoration asking guests to try to figure out who is represented in the picture.
Picture centerpieces can serve as an icebreaker for a reunion at which people may not have seen each other for years. The pictures will evoke memories of the circumstances under which the picture was taken, the year of school or the party at which the event occurred, and other such memories that can jumpstart conversations.
Holiday Centerpieces
Holidays may be the most common reason for creating centerpieces to adorn a banquet table, and themed centerpieces can help to spread the cheer of the season.
For winter holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year's, play with the colors of the season. You can create snow with Styrofoam shavings or shredded paper. Decorate scenes with ribbons that include red, green, orange or blue to represent your respective holiday.
You may be afraid that including traditional symbols such as turkeys, Santa Claus and others may be stereotypical, but you can put your own unique spin on them. Step outside the box and create turkeys made of foam balls and place them around a dinner table of their own. Depict Santa Claus shoveling snow, or the New Year's baby dressed in a full formal suit instead of his traditional sash.
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