Feast tabletops READY, SET

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Dressing a table for a festive holiday meal can be as easy as tying a colored ribbon around a glass stem or as ambitious as buying special place settings and hiring a florist to design a centerpiece.

Plenty of imaginative ideas flowed from Washington-area interior designers and antiques dealers who were asked to invent table designs for the Georgetown Jingle benefit held Dec. 3 in the Four Seasons Hotel.

A silent auction allowed patrons to bid on some of the items shown throughout with proceeds going to the pediatric bone-marrow transplant program at Georgetown University Hospital. Sponsors plan this to be an annual event.

Interior designer David Herchik, owner of the District's JDS Designs, combined high and low styles for his contribution, titled "Santa's Christmas Day Breakfast." The table for six was covered with what he described as "ice," which was really white paint covered with microglitter.

Matching organza napkins were embroidered all over with the words "Ho Ho" in red, green and white. A CD player sat on the floor covered with fake snow. The other elements were supplied by his local Starbucks: coffee cups, gingerbread trees and other holiday ware that were then offered up for auction.

Interior designer David Mitchell, owner of the District firm David H. Mitchell Interior Design, went the other direction entirely, to provide what he calls a mock-up of a "Christmas in Aspen" because, he says, "that is where so many of my clients have houses."

The theme was carried through with many organic and textural notes. The tablecloth was a custom-made silk burlap decorated with birch reindeer, felt snowflakes, rock crystal and greenery.

The napkins were linen -- "washed but not ironed" -- and napkin rings were the thumbs of white hand-knitted mittens he bought at the Gap. Evergreen wreaths functioned as charger plates. The centerpiece was a birch-covered vase filled with holly.

"Unless you own red plates with Christmas trees on them, you use your everyday china," says Deborah Gore Dean, owner of Georgetown's Gore Dean, dealers in fine collectibles and antiques. Her choice in this case was a bright red-and-white "Balcons" pattern from Hermes. (The word applies the iron-wrought balconies of Portugal translated into geometric designs.)

With that she chose black beaded place mats over a smoky acrylic table. "All very stark," she says of the scene she titled "Exotic Christmas, set for four."