Whatever you celebrate, make it look nice

Simple hacks that are as smart as they are accessible. [View on web]( [Camila Alves McConaughey and Matthew McConaughey at Austin City Limits Music Festival 2023.]( Don’t worry about sourcing Victorian-era doilies on Etsy. Just make it look nice. | Dina Ávila/Eater I’m writing this on November 7, which means there are 16 days left until Thanksgiving. At [Eater at Home](, however, the holidays are already well underway: Last Wednesday, we launched Eater at Home for the Holidays, our annual package dedicated to eating and entertaining through this home stretch of the year. The theme for 2023 is [Make It Look Nice](. To be honest, it started out as kind of a joke. During one of our team planning meetings, we were discussing how to approach the holidays this year, a not-uncommon conundrum in the food media world. As the Home editor, I want to keep things [fresh]( and [unexpected](, which can be a challenge when there are only so many ways to remake the holidays. It’s a little like trying to come up with different ways to say a food is garlicky without using “garlicky” — the word is overused for a reason. Thanksgiving, though it has its detractors, is a holiday that many people love, and its traditional foods tend to provoke strong attachment, even if the best way to make them remains a source of [vigorous debate](. So let’s say you’re an editor thinking about how to approach Thanksgiving and the holidays at large. The options are somewhat limited. You can decide this will be the year of sides, or the year of pie, or the year of [comfort food](, or the year of [pandemic Thanksgiving](, where you eat alone or almost alone, and turn to your bar for inspiration. But you cannot decide not to do Thanksgiving at all; that is not an option, even if you, the editor, are personally planning to observe the holiday at Peking Duck House in Chinatown. A food publication deciding not to cover Thanksgiving is like ESPN sitting out the Super Bowl. You can’t do it. So when someone said during a planning meeting, possibly joking, or possibly in the flush of gentle exasperation, “just make it look nice,” it resonated. This didn’t come out of nowhere: We’d been talking about how far tablescapes have come, and all the ways to make your Thanksgiving seem fancy with almost no effort ([Use your dang gravy boat!]( Put some [oysters in your dressing!](), and it had become clear that while people don’t necessarily want to have to go all out for Thanksgiving, they do have certain hopes and goals for the appearance of their meal and table. And so, Make It Look Nice was born. The concept was elastic enough to encompass food, entertaining, and design, and also allowed us to exploit one of our strengths as a team, which is coming up with hacks (or, in Eater parlance, [Moves]() that make your cooking life easier and, in this case, fancier, but in an accessible way. On top of that, it gave our photographer, Dina Ávila, an excuse to incorporate disco balls into the gorgeous still lifes you’ll see throughout the package, a win for everyone involved. And in the process of editing and building these stories, I found helpful reminders that the holidays (just like holiday news and cultural coverage) don’t need to be either impossibly pristine or wildly composed. The tablescapes in our shoots still look nice, of course (mini disco balls have a way of raising the stakes), but there will always be room for me, and editors like me, to heed the same advice we preach to readers like you who are looking for inspiration and encouragement during the stampede of the holiday season. Sometime next August or early September we’ll start this process all over again, sifting through the zeitgeist to divine what the holidays of 2024 will look like on Eater. In the meantime, I hope your holidays are happy, whether you own a gravy boat or not. If you like this email, please forward it to a friend. If you aren't signed up for this newsletter, you can [do so right here](. —Rebecca Marx, Home Editor  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=today). View our [Privacy Notice]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 11, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2023. All rights reserved.