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It’s finally December and the spirit of the holiday season is getting in to full swing here in the U.S. For most of us, Thanksgiving officially kicks off the festivities, and for some, it even begins as early as Halloween. But no matter when your family traditionally welcomes the season, it’s a magical and wondrous time for the little ones in our lives.
Ask anyone you know and they’ll probably be able to spout out one tradition that their family has had or continues during the holiday season. While the origins of this special time are based on religious and spiritual beliefs, many traditions celebrated are born from families creating memories in their own way and then sustained for years to come. It’s something that brings us together in familiarity and comfort.
Italians also understand this and base many of their traditions on bringing family together and creating a meaningful experience their children will remember and share for the rest of their lives. They also celebrate within their own cultural timeline.
Italians may begin their winter holiday a little later than us, but they also extend the celebration well into January, creating massive excitement and extended anticipation for kids across the country.
The season typically begins on December 8 with the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception. This is a national holiday with significant importance to the Roman Catholic Church, and also the official day when most put up their holiday decorations and Christmas trees. It’s a spectacle to behold with sights, sounds, and smells to heighten the senses of holiday revelers young and old.
In the Novena, or eight days before Christmas, streets are filled with carolers singing traditional songs. In Rome and other locations, you will see the zampognari or bagpipe players who travel from the nearby Abruzzi Mountains to play throughout the streets for the local children. At the same time, piazzas across Italy are enveloped with beautiful lights and decorations, including artisanal handmade presepi, or nativity scenes. You’d be hard pressed not to find one in any city or town.
Other Italian traditions include skipping meat on Christmas Eve as a way to purify their bodies for Christmas Day, often replaced with grand feasts and multiple courses of beautiful seafood instead. While many end the day with Midnight Mass, there are also those brave ones who ski down the Dolomites at the strike of midnight carrying torches to welcome Christmas – an incredible sight to behold.
Christmas Day of course is filled with large meals, loads of family and friends, and glorious Italian foods, including the traditional dessert of panettone, a sweet bread loaf filled with candied fruit and raisins that children love.
The feasting and celebration continues into the New Year, but comes to a crescendo January 6, the twelfth day of Christmas and the Day of the Epiphany.
The night before, large meals are once again shared with family and friends to mark the end of the season, and La Befana, a witch who flies on her broom and brings good children treats and bad children coal, delivers her gifts and goodies.
We delight in and appreciate all of the holiday traditions of Italy and hope that all of our followers are able to continue their own family traditions, or start some new ones. Focusing ideas and activities around the children in our lives is a great place to start, and often means these traditions are carried forward for generations to come.
We’d like to help by offering tips and ideas for the table – more specifically, the children’s table.
Rather than setting up a small card table or relegating the little ones to a counter with stools, make their meal memorable by creating something colorful and unique to mark the occasion. Kids notice these things and love when they are singled out with something special just for them. And if you turn it into a tradition, they have something to look forward to each year.
Our children’s table shown here uses our bright and cheerful POP collection. Use these pieces as a backdrop for anything you’d want to add to make it even more festive for the kids. Involving them as much as possible in the party and the preparation makes it special for everyone!
Consider a few of these ideas to get your creativity flowing and to start some new family traditions.
No matter what you have planned this season, we hope you all are lucky enough to spend just a small bit of time seeing the holidays through the eyes of a child and creating new traditions and memories for years to come. The pure joy, laughter, and whimsy children evoke is the most simple yet poignant way we can think to embrace and celebrate the season.
Buon Natale!
Entertaining during the holidays doesn’t have to be complicated. Serving simple items and dishes that are plated and presented beautifully can give the appearance that a lot more effort was required.
Next in our winter series, let’s look at how to creatively dish out the snacks and sweets for your holiday guests.
What Italian feast doesn’t include a hunk of crusty, chewy bread or fresh breadsticks served with extra virgin olive oil for dipping?
While we like to keep it simple, we make it special by sourcing the best tasting freshly baked breads we can find and serving them warm with our favorite olive oil for special occasions. A little garnish of green is all you need to create a beautiful platter, or you can kick it up a notch with some dried fruits or fresh Mediterranean olives.
Dessert can be an excuse to entertain all on its own. You can start by inviting friends over for an Italian coffee with a shot of Strega, a digestif with hints of juniper, mint, and saffron. Top it off with some fresh whipped cream and a hint of grated nutmeg. Delizioso!
Whether post dinner or a dessert only party, creating a dessert bar offers a variety of options and the serving pieces can make it even more interesting.
Using the simple beauty of fruits with stems and leaves intact alongside homemade cakes and cookies is a winning combination. This cake pictured was made by our food stylist with a wonderful mold that makes the most basic recipe look sophisticated. Serve it on a beautiful dish with a sprig of holly or sliced lemons or oranges and it takes it to a whole other level.
If you have a larger group, you can add bowls and cups of beautiful candies or nuts to fill out your dessert bar. Not everything has to be homemade – sometimes just a hint of something to satisfy a sweet tooth is all your guests require.
Read our next installment - Picture Imperfect
For the fourth and final entry to our fall lifestyle series, let’s end with the cocktail hour.
Having guests over on a crisp fall evening can be the perfect festive occasion. And you don’t always have to entertain by preparing a large meal. Sometimes inviting friends for a cocktail is the best way to do some stress-free entertaining during a busy holiday season.
To set the scene, a bouquet of colorful fall tulips in our Zucca pitcher and a decanter from our Selezione collection full of our famous Rosemarino cocktail are just the ambience needed for a pre-dinner happy hour. Pair them with a cheese or charcuterie appetizer served on our Legna olive wood servers, turn on some music, and you have the ideal atmosphere for entertaining your holiday guests.
Rosemarino Cocktail
We hope you’ve enjoyed our Fall Entertaining Series and that you’ve been inspired to try some of these ideas yourself. Remember, keep it simple, mix and match, and let the natural beauty of the dinnerware and delicious food be the perfect backdrop for what really matters most; precious time with family and friends.
As we continue our series, let’s turn to our attention to creating an elegant serving display.
First, we are very excited about the inclusion of our new olive wood collection called Legna. These rich and elegant pieces are durable, come in a variety of sizes, and bring more of that natural element to any table.
All of our products function quite well for prepping, but they’re also attractive enough to go straight to the table for serving appetizers or incorporating into a buffet. And the Legna collection is no exception – they are perfect for serving your guests. Below, we’ve layered them with crisp linens on our natural wood table to serve parmagiano reggiano and mozzarella cheeses, hand picked apples, and pane carasau – thin, crispy, twice baked crackers. The addition of the rosemary sprig provides just enough texture and a whimsical accent of greenery. Again, you have a neutral backdrop that’s warm and elegant contrasting with the color and texture of your food resulting in a beautiful and inviting display.
Our ceramic centerpieces also work well for many purposes, including as a serving bowl for salads as we’ve used ours below. You can also use them as a place to put a hardy mum surrounded by gourds or greenery, to hold your favorite seasonal fruits, or you can partner them with the olive wood boards to serve breads and crackers. The possibilities are endless. The beauty of the piece with its swooping handles, unique shape, and artisan hand painting requires only simple solutions for its contents.
To round out your serving needs, the dual-section of our antipasto dish is used here for additions to the salad, but we’ve also used ours for olives and pits, nuts, candies, and condiments. Its versatility makes for a wonderful gift that will be used again and again.
Bringing these pieces together and layering them with beautiful linens and textures from nature places the attention on the food while still providing a festive backdrop for your holiday entertaining.
Our next in the series - Cocktail Hour
In the second entry of our lifestyle series, we worked with a few ideas on place settings. We took the idea of incorporating nature and textures and mixed it with flatware adding some fun to the place card concept.
We loved the idea of weaving herbs and floral into the tablescape as a whole. As you can see from the first photo, we took a single sprig of rosemary and the simple yet beautiful Michelangelo flatware and tied them together with a rich velvet ribbon, setting them on top of a crisp, off-white linen napkin.
It’s easy and elegant and also provides your dinner guests with a wonderful scent of rosemary.
As shown above and for the purposes of our photo shoot, we chose to keep the beauty of the wood table as the base instead of displaying a Biancheria ivory placemat in full. But as you build your own tablescape, the placemat provides an elegant backdrop to your favorite dinner pieces.
As you build out the rest of your place setting, use natural elements mixed with different pieces to layer your table. As you can see below, the table setting we chose includes a dahlia and some eucalyptus in a small glass votive. We then used the napkins from our Biancheria Green collection and layered them in a gentle roll mimicking the curved stems on our Villa d’Este amber glassware.
Again, the focus is on elegant yet simple beauty through the mixing and layering of natural textures and patterns.