Elder Care Activities: Place Setting Ideas for Your Thanksgiving Table
Elder Care in Los Angeles CA
Supporting your parents’ mental and emotional health is an important element of your elder care plan, and it is especially important during the holiday season when aging adults may feel disconnected from all of the holiday preparations and fun due to their challenges and limitations. One way that you can help your seniors feel more involved and engaged during the holiday season is doing projects with them that they can see put to use during the celebrations.
Place settings are a lovely addition to a Thanksgiving table, creating organization, adding attractive seasonal touches, and making each guest feel acknowledged and important. They are also a wonderful way for you to encourage your elderly adults to get involved in the holiday preparations by helping you to design, create, and implement the settings. Even if they are not able to do all of the things that they used to do to get ready for the holiday, putting together place settings is a way for your seniors to make a positive and tangible contribution to Thanksgiving, and may even begin new traditions for your family.
Use these ideas to inspire you for place settings your aging parents can create on their own, with you, or with their elderly health care services provider:
• Simple napkin. Create a streamlined, polished look for each place setting with basic dishes, a fabric napkin, and a piece of whole, seasonal fruit. Stack a white salad plate on top of a white dinner plate and set these on top of a placemat. Fold a colored fabric napkin horizontally to create a band and drape this across the dishes, tucking their ends under the edges of the dinner plate to tie the setting together. Top it with a piece of whole fruit.
• Mini pumpkins. Print out pages of text from a favorite book on cream colored cardstock. Cut out gift tag shapes and use a gold or black permanent marker to write the name of each guest on a tag. Add a hole at the end of the tag and feed kitchen twine through it. Tie each of these tags around a mini pumpkin to set at each spot at the table.
• Caramel apples. Making caramel apples is an impressive, yet simple, treat that makes a beautiful place setting that doubles as a favor for your guests. Your parents and their elderly health care services provider can put together festive apples using store bought caramel, sprinkles, peanuts, and other toppings, and then wrap them in plastic and tie with a colorful ribbon for an attractive finish. Add a nametag to each apple and set in the center of plates at each setting.
• Thankfulness leaves. Cut leaf shapes out of red, orange, and brown cardstock and punch a hole in each. Write your guests’ names on the leaves in black or metallic permanent markers and then use kitchen twine to attach the leaves to the markers. Put these at the places at the table and encourage your guests to write something that they are thankful for on the back of the leaf so that you can share them during dinner.
If you or an aging loved one needs elder care services in Los Angeles, CA, call Livewell Private Care at (310) 933-4986. Servicing Los Angeles, CA and the surrounding areas.