Some Christmas tables are quietly refined elegance. Others are minimalist. This one is neither.

This one is a swirl of colour, characters, and festive exuberance — a little bit fairy tale, a little bit pantomime, and entirely exuberant.

I think of it as A Children’s Christmas in Versailles: playful, theatrical, and delightfully over the top, with just enough structure to keep it from tipping into chaos.

The starting point was Anthropologie’s 12 Days of Christmas plate series from a few years ago (eBay) — a set that is as charming as it is challenging to style. Each plate tells its own story, illustrated in wildly different colours and populated by fantastical creatures: leopards leaping through golden rings, owls piping, rabbits milking, swans swimming, and hens dancing in wreaths. Individually, they’re enchanting. Together, they were… tricky.

The Challenge of Colour (and How to Embrace It)

At first glance, the plates don’t obviously “go” together. The palette runs the gamut — emerald green, plum, crimson, aqua, sunshine yellow, midnight blue. My instinct, initially, was to try to calm them down. That was a non-starter.

The breakthrough came courtesy of my web designer — Mary’s suggestion: lean into the colour.

Enter a set of multicoloured pressed-glass goblets — an Amazon find that turned out to be exactly what the table needed. Once the glasses were in place, the plates stopped competing and began conversing. The colours suddenly felt intentional rather than unruly, and the table found its rhythm.

Gold chargers and Royal Doulton Forsyth dinner plates at each setting provide a unifying thread — a little Versailles glamour anchoring all that whimsy.

The gold tablecloth, napkin rings and little tree placecard holders were a years-ago acquisition from Chintz & Company. in Victoria, B.C.

A Table for Children (and the Young at Heart)

Despite the grandeur of the reference point, this is very much a children’s table — or perhaps more accurately, a table that invites everyone to see Christmas through a child’s eyes.

The centrepiece runs the length of the table: jars of sweets, jelly beans, and wrapped chocolates nestled among pine branches and candlelight. It’s unapologetically festive and intentionally irresistible. This is definitely not a “look but don’t touch” arrangement.

Just look at all that candy, Nana!! Can we eat it now?

The plates themselves do most of the storytelling. The familiar cadence of The Twelve Days of Christmas gives the table a sense of order, while the illustrations keep things lighthearted and imaginative.

First, we have what I always think of as “the bird group”:

Interrupted by a Leopard with Five Gold Rings.

Before the feathered faction resumes a-laying and a-swimming.

Then we move onto the industrious maids a-milking.

Before embarking on the musical faction dancing, leaping, drumming, and piping,

Christmas, after all, is the season for sparkle, surprise, and a touch of theatrical joy. Versailles embodied this. Children understand this instinctively. So let’s celebrate the best of it with an over-the-top table of colour and craziness.

Why Colour Works So Beautifully at Christmas

Christmas has an extraordinary capacity to absorb colour. Unlike most other seasons, it doesn’t require restraint or a narrowly defined palette to feel harmonious. Instead, it welcomes abundance — jewel tones, brights, metallics, pattern, and a certain sense of cheerful excess.

That doesn’t mean anything goes. Colour works best at Christmas when it has anchors: white china, gold chargers, greenery, candlelight, or a theme that ties disparate hues together. Here, the rhythm of The Twelve Days of Christmas, along with gold and evergreen, provides structure for a wide-ranging palette to flourish.

What can feel less satisfying are schemes that strip the season back to near invisibility. I love woodland themes, for example, but not when they’ve been pared down to the point of starkness: all beige, white, and grey, with a single pine cone doing heroic duty. Minimalism has its place, but that place is not Christmas (at least to me).

Similarly, highly controlled colour pairings — all orange and pink, or turquoise and purple — can be striking, but they don’t always convey the warmth and generosity we associate with the season unless they’re grounded by more traditional notes.

Christmas colour works when it feels layered rather than forced. It recalls sweets in bright wrappers, vintage tins on sideboards, nativity plays, illustrated songbooks, stained glass, and the happy jumble of decorations accumulated over time.

A Final Note on Christmas Tables

I own several sets of The Twelve Days of Christmas — some painterly, some elegant, some positively dignified — but this one is different. This set is pure fun. And at Christmas, there is room at the table for all of it.

Can you believe we are within two weeks of Christmas? Here in the Entertablement household, we are feverishly working on completing a wooden Queen Anne dollhouse in the hope it will be finished by Christmas Eve for the moving-rapidly-into-teen-years granddaughters. Longtime readers may recall a similar project for the Playhouse Under The Stairs – gulp – eight years ago. Stay tuned!