The Giving of Thanks

I hope you all had as wonderful Thanksgiving as we did. Thanksgiving is my one of my favorite holidays (Halloween is #1) and my husband and I have hosted 5 of the 7 years that we've lived in the Bay Area, this being our first one as a married couple! This year, we kept it small, only 7 people total and I'd like to share my turkey day decor and food with you.


A few weeks ago, our coffee table finally gave out on it's last legs (literally) so Mike and I bought a new one large enough to fit 8 people around. (Hooray for double-duty furniture!) This meant that we all sat on pillows on the floor, but for our casual group of friends this worked out great and was perfect for an after dinner game of Apples to Apples.

Each place setting was outfitted with new place mats and napkins from my favorite store, Crate and Barrel, and we used our existing everyday dinnerware, drinkware and flatware. For the centerpiece, I simply collected colorful fall leaves and placed gorgeous birch candles from Pottery Barn on top. The place cards  were yellow leaves picked from our backyard with each guests name written and tucked into our new napkin rings.

Since our coffee table wasn't large enough to hold 8 people and the food, we set up a buffet station on our small, existing dining table so our guests could serve themselves.

The Menu:

Appetizers
- Mushrooms stuffed with spinach and Grueyre
- Carmelized onion dip with crudite

Cocktail
- Warm apple cider spiked with Rob's cinnamon infused vodka (served in brown sugar rimmed margarita glasses and cinnamon stick stirrers)

Main Course
- Turkey stuffed with orange and lemon slices, rosemary and thyme
- Dressing with apples, celery and onion
- Sweet potatoes baked in an sweet orange liqueur sauce
- Johanna's cheesy potatoes 
- Classic green bean casserole (Dennis' favorite)
- Homemade cranberry sauce sauteed with apples and an orange liquer
- Crescent rolls (a staple of mine since childhood)

Desert
- Pumpkin pie (but, of course!)
- Michelle's chocolate mousse cookies and peanut butter chocolate drop cookies


Adjacent to the living room in our office, we set up our bar with wine, our signature cocktail and appetizers and later desert. We lined the underside of our frosted glass desk with white Christmas lights to give a little extra glow to the room.

I forgot to nab a photo before everyone started digging in!

All in all I think this year's celebration was a success. I have so much to be thankful for this year and was happy to share the day with friends that I think of as family.

Hello world! My name's Rhea but I'm also known as Chaos Tamer.

So I have to admit that I'm new to blogging. Of course I look at great blogs all day, but this might be my first blog post...ever.

Let me start telling you a little about how Chaos Tamer came to be.

I came to San Francisco almost 7 years ago to study interior design. After working for a residential designer and later a large architecture firm I realized that while I love design, that path was just not right for me. When the economy tanked, I was left unemployed just four months before my wedding. Of course I felt a bit of panic at first (as anyone who's been laid off will tell you) but it ended up being a really great thing for me. I spent those four months planning our wedding to a tee, I started doing Pilates about four times a week and just mentally prepared myself for this next phase of life. During this time, the thought of Chaos Tamer literally came to me in my sleep, even the name. The next morning I bought the domain name and started hashing out a plan. The general idea was to become a professional organizer and help people reclaim their homes from the clutter that's taken over.

My new husband and I

The wedding came and went (and was the very best day of my life) and the honeymoon also came and went. And when I finally returned back to Earth from spending all of October on cloud 9 it was time to get to work on making this dream my reality.

The view from our over water bungalow (!)

So here we are. This business is in the VERY early stages, we just got the website live yesterday and I don't even have business cards yet! (Although they are designed...just need to get them printed)

I also have my VERY fist Chaos Tamer client meeting tomorrow, redesigning the product display case at my Pilates studio.

I hope to blog about this journey of starting my own business, but I also hope to share things that catch my fancy. I love fashion and food and really almost anything domestic. My friends will tell you that I'm so organized it's almost to a fault. Here is to hoping I can teach other people how to adopt some of those skills!

P.S. Since I don't have any photos yet of project related stuff, I thought I share a wedding photo and what is now the desktop image of my computer.