Here’s the thing: If you own your family’s vintage china and silver, you don’t really need to worry about holiday table settings. The individual pieces pretty much dictate where they are supposed to go and how they are supposed to be used, and you’d need a court order to prevent the older women in your family from “advising” you about what to do with them.

If you are young, or have young children, you will almost certainly be shanghaied into those older relatives’ celebrations, so any table setting issues would be their problem.

But what if this is a “Friendsgiving” situation, or you are hosting your extended family for the first time? It goes without saying that rent or student loan payments have eaten up your potential table setting budget. Your most pressing priority might be to impress your friends. Or to avoid passive-aggressive comments from your mother-in-law. Or to keep your Uncle Charlie from sharing his deeply held political beliefs.

That’s where a creative table setting is your friend.

Dishes

We’ve already established that you can’t afford a perfectly-matched set of fine china. A shrewd alternative is to lean heavily in the other direction, and set the table with a completely mis-matched set of dishes. One or two trips to a flea market, or a thrift store, or the dollar store, will allow you to set your table with Delft ware, unconventionally shaped soup bowls, and 1970s Patriots commemorative plates.

Will this raise a few eyebrows? Absolutely, but it will also give everyone at the table something to talk about. Your mother might normally have some pointed observations to make, but she wants to keep Uncle Charlie redirected as much as you do. She will definitely have some very involved story about the mother of somebody you half remember from your childhood, and her misadventures in Miami.

Your friends will just think you’re cool.

This works for silverware, too.

Your Tablecloth and Placemats

This is where a fabric store or a thrift store come into their own.

Yes, most thrift stores carry vintage tablecloths, but do you know what other great fabric they sell very, very cheaply?

Drapes.

They are usually gathered into pleats at the top, but it will take you literally two minutes or less to snip them so they fall flat. Unlike an actual tablecloth-tablecloth, you won’t have to iron it.

At the fabric store, buy three yards of the most deeply discounted fabric they have. If it frays around an edge, either tape it under with painter’s tape, or fray all the edges, so it looks deliberate.

The Centerpiece

Almost any flea market, and every single thrift store, will carry dozens of vases of every conceivable size. I keep my eye out for silver-plated pitchers or coffee pots, which look dynamite with dried flowers, or two of the cheapest supermarket bouquets that they carry.

A Fancy Dessert

I can hear you now — “I can’t make a fancy dessert! I can barely make toast!”

Trust me; this is easy. 

Make or buy a pie. If you buy one from the supermarket, just slide it out of the aluminum pie tin, and into a pie plate. Then do this.

Even Uncle Charlie will be impressed.

Even one of these ideas will help your situation. But together, the overall effect is impressive. It makes you look sophisticated. It makes you look like you are your own person. It makes you look like a grownup.  •

A Halloween Cocktail

by John Fladd

There are three excellent ways to spend Halloween as a grownup:

1. Getting invited to a fancy-shmancy costume party, with mysterious, attractive people, and the liberal drinking of beverages — but we know that that is increasingly unlikely to happen as the years go by.

2. Sitting in a warm living room with a beverage, watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and only getting up periodically to answer the door and dispense candy, or to refresh your beverage.

3. Sitting in a lawn chair with your neighbors, enjoying beverages, pretending that you are judges on a reality show, rating the costumes of children, and awarding them treats, accordingly. (Teenagers with no costume collecting candy in a pillow case get pretzels.)

Have you noticed a common theme? 

This is a classic, refreshing mojito, with perhaps just a hint of fruitiness from the grenadine. It has long been accepted as a scientific fact that mojitos are the easiest drinking and most social of cocktails, and this is no exception. Mint and lime deliver a classic flavor. The sparkle of carbonation and hint of hidden rum make promises – extravagant promises. But Halloween is all about revealing secrets and hinting at extravagant promises, so you’re covered.