Buffet

When the dining table only seats four and there are nine of you, a sit-down Thanksgiving with every dish passed around isn’t going to work. A buffet does. Everyone fills a plate, finds a seat wherever there’s one (sofa, floor cushion, the arm of a chair), and the table is free for the food. The tricky part in a small apartment isn’t the food, it’s the traffic. Here’s how to set it up so people aren’t queuing through the kitchen while you’re trying to carve. ...

In December the sideboard does a lot of work: extra plates, the dessert, the candles that didn’t fit on the table. Decorating it is mostly about planning for that, so there’s still room to set a dish down. A sideboard is low and long, so it needs some height. The wall above it does half the job. The base A garland along the top. A faux garland (on Amazon) the length of the sideboard, hanging 4 to 6 inches over each end. Everything else sits in it. Faux rather than fresh, because fresh garland drops needles into the food. Fluff every branch out before you start; a thin garland makes everything on it look thin. ...