Our Thanksgiving Dinner Flower & Food Inspirations! (2020)

And just like that, Thanksgiving is almost here!

This year, I can't help but feel even more thankful than any other year. Saying it's been a crazy year is a total understatement. However when life throws these kinds of curve balls, it is good to take a day and look at what we still have and be extra thankful.

One thing that I am extremely thankful for is the Floral Support team. I don't even know where to start! And you know what.. I won't start, because then this blog would be WAY to long and sappy (lol).

Really why I am here is to give you tips on how to celebrate this wonderful holiday with simple flowers and food!

First let's start with the flowers.

All you will need is a variety of short vases (or jars), a bundle of (local!) flowers and clippers or sharp scissors. One thing that I have always done is save any and every jar that we have for either gifting flowers or little projects like this! What you see in the photo is a mix of pickle jars, jam jars and bud vases.

So save your jars! They can come in handy someday.

Start by testing out how many jars or vases you can fit down the centre of your table—I could fit 9 vases comfortably—Then shop for your flowers!

In each vase, I put in a different cluster of the same flower. I decided to do an ombre effect, starting with blush pink at one end, moving into yellows, then orange, red, burgundy and ending in black.

Because I knew I had 9 vases, I made sure to have 9 different flowers that gradually brought you through the "autumn section" of the colour wheel.

This might be my favourite way to design for evenings like Thanksgiving. So easy to do, looks impressive and done in minutes!

You could really do this with any colour and you don't have to do the ombre effect! Having a long line of jars with all the same flower, or same colour is really beautiful as well. Just remember that blog posts like this are to inspire you, not for you to think you have to do exactly what you see!

Next up is place settings. This is something that you may notice in the photos below, the tiniest little detail makes an impact! I took clippings from local eucalyptus and placed them on each table setting. Just to add a little bit of colour to the plates.

Now let's dive into all the food! Each of us made our own dish for dinner and the recipes will be listed at the end of this blog post. (wow, I just realized that I have turned into that blogger that posts a recipe and makes you scroll through the whole blog post to find the recipe!! lol)

Jael prepared this piece of artwork as a starter for dinner! All I have to say is WOW. We were all obsessing over this spread and enjoyed it before our meal!

I think my favourite was the pumpkin filled with the butternut squash spread. So cute and so yummy! Again, this is something that is so simple to do, yet looks impressive. Just look at that cute pumpkin!

Emandare Vineyard's Pinot Noir paired so well with this spread. I can say this because I had most of this spread and wine. I am just 1 out of the 3 women not expecting a baby at this dinner table, so someone had to eat it all! With the help of our plus ones of course (our husbands).

Thanksgiving isn't Thanksgiving without a little drama right??

Everything that we had in the oven needed to be finished off in our BBQ... all because I dropped the nuts... Like a whole cup of nuts at the bottom of the oven lol.

So instead of starting a fire, I turned the oven off and straight to the BBQ everything went! The turkey legs were all ready cooked from JD Turkey Farms, and the turkey breast was very close to being done. So really it wasn't that big of a deal! It finished off the cooking perfectly.

Victoria made a delicious dish with yams (also shown on the BBQ keeping warm). This will definitely be added to my favourite recipes! It is a very comforting dish, perfect for this time of year as we head into cooler weather and darker evenings.

The dish that I made is my favourite wild rice pilaf. I am gluten free, so I like this dish as it's a great substitute for stuffing. It is made with wild rice, apples, walnuts and cranberries, so you can't go wrong! Now if you are one of those lucky ones who can have gluten, don't substitute this for stuffing, it's not the same at all lol. However, it is really tasty!