My husband “quietly mentioned” on his blog that I had picked up 300 white cloth napkins in Mississippi. A small purchase, don’t you think? Especially since they were only twenty cents each! But I thought I should explain why I got them.

We are having our church feast this year as usual in January. This is a dinner that we do with Trinity Reformed and it is quite a bit of fun. Usually we just reserve a banquet room at a local hotel, sell tickets, and someone else does the cooking. But this year the ladies decided to do the cooking themselves, the elders thought it was a great idea, so we reserved a big room, and a bunch of the women have volunteered to prepare food. Even though we have quite a few more than 300 adults in the combined churches, we are shooting high to hope for 300 to attend. We would rather shoot high than low, we don’t want to run out of food, and the more the merrier.

So we’ve reserved the place settings at a local rental joint and done all the arranging we can to make this a fun event. My only disappointment was that we were going to have to use paper napkins because the cost of renting them was too much, and to buy them seemed even more unreasonable.

But it seems that God took pity on me in my napkin plight. While we were visiting in Mississippi, I was discussing this with some of the ladies there, when one of them (thank you, Charlotte) told me about a great outlet that sold napkins to restaurants….and so one thing lead to another, and her daughter (thank you, Calen) managed to round up 300 for me! Yahoo! Then another dear friend (thank you, Jeannette) picked up an extra suitcase for me so we could get them home.

So now, I will have napkins that will be available for any event of modest size (sorry, not enough for Trinity fest). And you never know, my Sabbath table may get out of hand some day.

It’s all the little things combined that make a table and feasting together glorious. I know the paper napkins would not have ruined the party. Far from it. But I’m convinced that those cloth napkins will make it far merrier.

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