Forty dollars sets a six-seat Christmas table if you already own plates and glasses: a garland down the middle three feet of the table, a 3-pound bag of mandarins, six tealights in glass cups on the bare wood at the two ends, a $1.50 pack of ball ornaments, ribbon on the napkins, and a paper tag on a mandarin at each seat instead of place cards. The receipt is below, with the prices I found on September 3.
The receipt
| Item | Where | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Artificial garland, 9 ft | Walmart | $15 |
| Glass tealight holders, 6 | Dollar Tree | $7.50 |
| Unscented tealights, 20 | Dollar Tree | $1.25 |
| Mandarins, 3 lb bag | Walmart | $4.97 |
| Ball ornaments, 12 | Dollar Tree | $1.50 |
| Ribbon roll, 4 yd | Dollar Tree | $1.50 |
| Gift tags, 25 | Dollar Tree | $1.50 |
| Flour sack towels, 5 | Walmart | $5.62 |
That’s $38.84. The garland line is a budget figure, for reasons in the next section, and the mandarins are a September price for a December table, so expect that one to move a little. Everything else is what the product page said.
Dollar Tree’s prices have moved. Most of its Christmas decor is $1.50 now, and the tealights and the glass cups are among the last things still at $1.25. The website sells by the case, anywhere from 24 to 48 of a thing, so for six of everything, go to the store.
The garland, and why it doesn’t run the whole table
Walmart’s own Holiday Time garland wasn’t listed in early September, and Dollar Tree’s 39 garlands were all tinsel, balls, poinsettias or gnomes. The cheapest 9-foot evergreen garland Walmart itself would ship was about $15, and a third-party seller had one at $9 plus shipping. When the seasonal aisle arrives in October, the house brand should come in under $15.
Nine feet is the length they sell, and you won’t use all of it on the table. A standard six-seater is 72 inches long and 36 to 42 inches wide, three seats down each side, nobody at the ends. This table gives the garland the middle three feet and leaves 18 inches of bare wood at each end, because that’s where the candles go, and if you seat people at the ends there’s nowhere on this table for a lit candle at all. Five feet of garland on three feet of table gives you loose curves, and nine feet is a pile, so cut the artificial one down to about 5 feet with wire cutters, since it’s plastic tips on a wire core. The cut leaves sharp wire ends, so bend them back into the greenery or tape them, and fluff the tips near the cut. The 4 feet you cut off, with its own cut end taped, wraps the base of the tree.
The free version is fresh trimmings. Tree lots trim the lower branches so the trunk fits a stand, and the trimmings pile up; some lots hand them over, some sell them by the bundle. It’s the same greenery as the fir in the Scandinavian Christmas table, laid end to end along the middle three feet. The cut ends leave sap on your hands. Illinois Extension’s guide to cut evergreens says to soak the branches overnight before they come inside, keep them out of sun and heat drafts, spritz them, and expect at least a few weeks indoors. What extends that is a water source, meaning wet floral foam under the greens. A bare table has none, so plan on a second armful around the 15th. Trimmings instead of the Walmart garland brings the total to about $24.
The red comes from the produce section
Walmart’s 3-pound bag of mandarins was $4.97, marked down to $4.50 the week I checked. A bag holds somewhere between a dozen and eighteen. Six go on the plates, one per seat. Four or five more get settled into the garland where branches cross, so they don’t roll, about 8 inches apart. The rest stay in the fruit bowl.
The six on the plates are the place cards. A mandarin has no stem to tie a tag to, so the tag goes on a toothpick. Write the name first, while the tag is flat. Then push the toothpick through the card twice, about an inch apart like a stitch, and spear the point into the stem button at the top of the fruit. Stitched, the tag stands up at a lean. Threaded through its own string hole, it swings around the pick and hangs face down. Pull the pick before anyone peels the fruit.
They won’t last the month on the table. UC Davis’s postharvest sheet for mandarins gives 2 to 6 weeks in a refrigerator at 41 to 46°F, and a heated dining room is warmer than that by 25 degrees. Eat them within the week. Fresh cranberries poured along the garland are the other grocery red, the trick from the Thanksgiving table, and they reach stores in the fall.
Tealights in glass, at the two ends
Tealights instead of tapers because they’re the cheapest flame you can buy, at $1.25 for 20 at Dollar Tree, and because the whole thing in its cup stands just over 3 inches tall, well under the 12-inch height limit for a centerpiece in the fall centerpiece guide. The wax melts into its own aluminum cup. Most tapers drip.
The cups are Dollar Tree’s clear ribbed glass tealight holders, $1.25 each and 3.125 inches tall. The Luminessence tealights are 20 to a pack at $1.25, three dinners’ worth. Lighting six every night from December 1 through New Year’s is about 180 tealights, so Walmart’s Mainstays 50-count at $4.46 with a stated 3-hour burn is eight nights, and IKEA’s GLIMMA 100-pack at $6.99 with a 4-hour burn is sixteen. Light them on the nights people sit down.
Now the other 12-inch rule, the one about distance. NFPA says to keep candles at least 12 inches from anything that can burn, and it names Christmas as the peak day of the year for candle fires. A fluffed garland is close to a foot wide, and fresh greenery gets more flammable every day it dries. On a 36-inch table that leaves about 12 inches of bare wood on each side of the greenery, and a dinner plate takes 10 or 11 of them. So there’s no spot beside the garland for a lit candle that’s a foot from the greenery and still on the table, which is why the garland stops at three feet. At each end, line the three cups up along the table edge, an inch or so in. That puts the glass a good 14 inches from the last of the greenery, and the light comes from the two ends of the table rather than the middle.
A tealight in a 3-inch glass is still a cup of hot wax in glass that gets hot, and a sleeve can knock one over, so keep them clear of where the serving dishes land. LED tealights are the only kind that go in among the greenery, and the fall guide has a $15 three-pack with a timer.
Ornaments, six of them
Ball ornaments pushed into the garland, caps pulled off so no silver shows. Use the ones you own if you have any. At 2 inches across they’re close to the size of the mandarins, and on three feet of garland six of them, with the four or five mandarins, is about one round thing every 3 or 4 inches, which looks decorated without looking like the tree fell over. One color plus one metallic, red and gold or white and silver.
Dollar Tree’s Christmas House mixed ball pack is 12 for $1.50 at 50 mm, about 2 inches, in assorted finishes, and an assorted dozen usually yields six in two colors, with the rest for the tree. The other $1.50 ball packs on that shelf are assorted too, and they’re 30 to 40 mm, small enough to disappear in a garland. A true single-color 2-inch set costs more than $1.50, at Walmart or a craft store.
Napkins and the ribbon math
A rolled napkin with ribbon around it does the whole place setting. Any white napkin you own works. Buying them, Walmart’s Mainstays flour sack towels are $5.62 for five, each one 28 by 29 inches of plain cotton, and rolled they make a better napkin than most napkins do. The pack is five and the table is six. The sixth seat gets a folded paper napkin with the same ribbon on it, or a second pack takes the total to about $44.50.
The ribbon is Dollar Tree’s 4-yard roll at $1.50, and four yards is 144 inches. A rolled flour-sack towel comes to roughly 9 inches around depending on how tight you roll it, so cut six ties at 20 inches: that’s 120 inches, and 20 inches ties a knot with short tails or a small bow. A big bow wants a second roll. The gift tags are 25 for $1.50 in assorted Christmas prints. Plain kraft ones are a craft-store item, and they’re the one thing on this list I’d pay more for, because the print on a $1.50 tag fights the handwriting.
If you already own some of it
| You own | Subtract |
|---|---|
| Any garland, or a tree lot nearby | $15 |
| Six small glass cups or jars | $7.50 |
| Cloth napkins | $5.62 |
| Ball ornaments | $1.50 |
| Ribbon from last year’s wrapping | $1.50 |
| Tags, or card stock and scissors | $1.50 |
Own all of it and the table costs a bag of mandarins and a pack of tealights, under $7. Own the garland and the napkins and it’s about $18. Jam jars work as cups, and a jar is taller than the flame by a few inches.
What $40 doesn’t buy
A tablecloth. Bare wood under a garland looks better than a cloth under a garland, and it’s one less thing to wash on December 26. If the table is glass or laminate and you want it covered, a white flat sheet works if it’s twin size or bigger: a twin flat is 66 by 96 inches, which hangs a foot over each end of a 72-by-36 table and more at the sides, as long as it’s a flat sheet and not a fitted one. Once there’s cloth on the ends, the lit tealights at each end go on a saucer, or they go LED.
Chargers, tall centerpieces, matching anything, and the “tablescape in a box” kits, which run well past $40 for a runner you’d reuse and six of everything else you wouldn’t.
The next $20, if you have it, goes on real cloth napkins, a 12-pack in white, before any more decor. Walmart had a 12-pack on sale at $11.66 in early September, from a regular price near $20.
Christmas table questions
How long can the table stay set? The garland, ornaments and cups from December 1 through New Year’s. The mandarins get eaten and replaced weekly. Fresh greenery on a bare table dries out in a heated room and gets swapped for a fresh armful partway through.
Fresh or artificial garland? Artificial for a table you set on December 1 and leave alone. Fresh if the tree lot is on your route and you don’t mind restocking it once.
Can the tealights go in the garland? Only LED ones. Lit tealights line up along the table edge at each bare end, a good foot from the greenery.
How many mandarins do I need? One 3-pound bag for a six-seat table, six on plates and four or five in the garland. Buy a second bag when the first gets eaten.
Do I need a runner under the garland? No. The plates cover most of the wood on either side of the greenery anyway, and a cloth runner puts fabric closer to the candles.
The cups and tealights are in Dollar Tree stores now. The garland can wait for the October aisle.