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On beauty, hospitality, and why the occasion doesn’t require an audience to be worth honoring.

Our teenager spent Easter in Rome this year.

She was there on a senior trip, celebrating Easter in one of the most beautiful cities in the world and, presumably, eating very well. We were not worried about her.

The rest of us—six at the table instead of seven—sat down to a proper Easter dinner in Winter Park. Tenderloin. Braised leeks in white wine sauce. Potatoes gratin. Wedge salads with homemade blue cheese dressing. Homemade tomato focaccia still warm from the oven. And the carrot cake, because that is simply how Easter ends in this house.

Someone asked if we were going to scale back since we weren’t hosting anyone.

We were not.

Over time, we’ve realized that family holiday traditions are about much more than a meal—they become part of the story a family tells about itself. Like most family holiday traditions, ours have been built slowly, over many years.

It’s a philosophy that has quietly shaped much of our life and, eventually, this publication.

Why We Do It

This is something we feel strongly about: the occasion does not require an audience to be worth honoring.

Feast days are feast days whether there are twenty people at the table or six. The table gets set properly. The kids dress for dinner.

Not because anyone is watching, but because we are—and because beautiful things are still worth doing, even when no one is.

Building Family Traditions

We want our children to grow up knowing what a well-cooked meal tastes like and what a properly set table looks like.

We want them to know how to sit at one—how to be present at a meal, how to honor the time someone spent preparing it, and how to welcome others to it one day.

We believe you learn those things by doing them, repeatedly, from the time you are small.

So we do.

Our six-year-old helped set the table this year. She knows where the forks go and how to fold a napkin, and she takes both very seriously.

The toddler boys are beginning to help too, in the way toddlers help—enthusiastically and with mixed results.

Even that is part of it.

You start somewhere.

The menu is something we’ve been working on for years. Not every holiday has a locked-in menu yet—that’s still in progress—but Easter is close.

This year felt nearly right. There will be small refinements. There always are. But the bones are there, and that’s its own kind of satisfaction.

We typically serve lamb for Easter, but this year—with a smaller table and no guests to feed—we made a different call: beef tenderloin. It was the right one.

What We Served

• Beef tenderloin with homemade horseradish cream
• Braised leeks in white wine sauce
• Potatoes gratin
• Wedge salads with homemade blue cheese dressing
• Homemade tomato focaccia
• Carrot cake

The braised leeks surprised everyone most and generated the most conversation at the table. The recipe deserves its own post and will get one.

And then there was the carrot cake, which by now has become less of a dessert and more of a family tradition.

The Table

We use holidays as an excuse to bring out the things that deserve to be used.

The floral linen runner. The rattan chargers. Linen napkins in wicker rings. The Bordallo Pinheiro platters in forest green.

The table should look like someone cared.

It takes twenty minutes to set it properly, and it changes the entire feeling of the meal—not just for the adults, but for the children sitting at it.

They notice. They always notice.

We don’t know which parts of these holidays our children will remember years from now.

It may be the carrot cake. It may be the Bordallo Pinheiro platters or the linen napkins or the fact that Easter always smells faintly of tomato focaccia by midafternoon. More likely, it will be the feeling of it all—the understanding that occasions are worth honoring, that beautiful things are worth making time for, and that home is something you build deliberately over many years.

The same philosophy is what informs the way we travel, too.

If we’re fortunate, they’ll grow up believing what we do: that the occasion does not require an audience to be worth honoring.

Continue reading in the Journal.