A Place for Our Stories at the Table

I’m a confirmed user of place cards for a holiday meal. They allow me to place guests together who would particularly enjoy one another. And they are great prompts to help us share our stories.

Place cards give me the pleasure of steering table conversation from the trivial to the significant. From what one is doing at work to what particular satisfaction is being derived from it. That’s because written inside each place card is a question for the guest, written not knowing whose name will be on the front of the card. At some point in the meal I will ask our guests to look at their questions, and we go around the table and answer them.

For Thanksgiving, of course the questions deal with thankfulness. Here are some samples:

“What is something you are thankful for that was difficult this year?”

“Where do you see a harvest in your life?”

“Where are you planting a seed in your life?”

“Share a Thanksgiving memory from your childhood.”

The hope is that gathered around the table at a feast, with worries at least for a time behind us, we will be at ease enough to share what is important to us. These are gifts that we give, if we feel secure enough.

To that end we have two rules for our table questions: You don’t have to answer your question, and if you liked someone else’s question better than yours, you can choose to answer it instead.

Pass the turkey. Pass on a legacy. Isn’t that what Thanksgiving is about?