let them eat soup

There’s a scene in the movie The Blindside, in which Sandra Bullock prepares a turkey feast for her onscreen family, and the minute she calls “Dinner,” everyone hits the buffet like a buffalo stampede and plops down in front of the football game.  (Thanks to their houseguest, Michael Oher, she finally corrals them over to the table to eat like civilized folk.)

I tend to have a more “Normal Rockwell” vision of Thanksgiving, often spending as much time planning my elaborate dining table as the turkey does planning his escape from my oven. And this year, I’ve settled on white: white dishes, white candles, white linens…even white pumpkins (which, in a fit of crazy, I may just carve into vases for white flowers). During a recent hunt for snowy-looking décor, these elegant little footed soup bowls from Williams Sonoma caught my eye. So did their $30 price tag, which doesn’t serve me well when I’m putting 20 people at my table.

Of course, right next to Williams Sonoma is Pottery Barn (same company—did you know that?), and guess what THEY were selling? Yes, elegant little footed soup bowls. For $9. (www.potterybarn.com)

Okay, so now I found myself on an obsessive mission to see if I could find them even cheaper; and I did, at www.crate&barrel, where they were only $3.95 (though, admittedly, a few ounces smaller than their expensive sisters).

So it looks like I’m serving soup for Thanksgiving. Now the big question: which pumpkins to buy? Real or fake?