It's Either Brilliant or Tacky. I Can't Tell for Sure.

For years, I, too, pooh-poohed the grandma mentality that declared that the "good furniture" needed to be protected from daily wear and tear, and thus clear plastic couch and chair slips were the only solution a reasonable person would advocate. Do you remember this trend from the late 1970s and early 1980s?

I have a vision of a particular room in my mind, though I cannot for the life of me recall whose room this is that I can see so clearly. The couch, love seat and armchairs are all upholstered in a cheerfully garish bright-yellow floral design that spreads itself across the white background like a preschooler's crayon drawing of a lemon orchard. The dark green foliage punctuates the blinding yellow flowers but somehow does not manage to tone them down. Prim, thick, clear vinyl covers are draped over every single piece of this furniture, but they do not tone down the screaming yellow either. The room is a treasure-trove of blazing yellow brightness, almost oppressively cheerful, so that the plastic covers on everything are somehow not completely abhorrent. (with thanks to these guys for the only image I could find of that phenomenon that swept the US when I was a child)

The clear heavy-duty floor runners, on the other hand? You know the ones I mean, the textured kind (so that you don't slip) that have stern teeth on their underside to bite into the carpet and prevent the shifting of the runner itself? The criss-crossed tracks of these runners protecting the white carpet from potentially dirty shoes seems to be taking it a bit too far. An entire yellow-and-white room, protected from the untoward advances of company by a veritable army of clear plastic swathing. It's an astonishing testament to the desire for cleanliness, really.

And yet.

I'm not sure if the following fact makes me trashy, or a little old lady in a teal-and-tangerine home in Florida, or just a hypocrite, but it is simply the truth: I have recently placed clear vinyl over fabric-covered furniture, and the result has made me almost impossibly happy.

We have redone our kitchen. A kitchen that has long oppressed me with its 1970s dark-walnut-stained cupboards and general feel of darkness. I always wanted a light and airy kitchen. I tried to cheerful up the awful cupboards when we first moved in by stripping the truly criminal striped-and-flowered wallpaper and painting the walls a warm golden moon color, and then putting up dark-green curtains for contrast. But paint turned out to be really more the color of pumpkin soup, and somehow the cupboards whose darkness felt so gloomy were ultimately made even worse. I woke up one morning and realized that the cabinets had secretly tricked me into setting them into an avocado-and-harvest gold color scheme any 1973 housewife would have been proud to call her own.

And then we had babies and other household projects to take care of, and suddenly, six years later, I simply couldn't stand the kitchen one more minute. So we painted it this gorgeous soothing shade of blue, and we went through the hours of labor it takes to clean and prime and paint 29 cupboards and drawers, so that all the cabinetry could become a glossy white. And then we got a new picture window and new hardware for all the door handles -- and suddenly the room is bigger and airier and modern. The great light fixtures we so loving chose in brushed nickel look right. Every time I walk into the room, I feel happy.

Except for the table. We have an awful table. It's large and plain and could be fine, except for the countless spills and stains and experiments with non-erasable markers and poundings of the tines of forks and other modes of destruction wrought by two children during their smallest years. Not yet quite past the "I forgot not to poke my fork into the table while I'm thinking" stage of their development, they do not inspire a lot of confidence in us to buy a new table just yet. But the old one looked so out of place suddenly.

Enter the Wedding Gift We Have Never Used. A beautiful tablecloth, in cotton, in soothing blues and greens, a graphic floral print that I ADORE but that never matched our room. Suddenly, the color is perfect in our kitchen; the cloth is exactly the right size for the table, is precisely wonderful...except for the minor fact that it is a cloth tablecloth and we have a son who, at nearly six, still sometimes gets so excited about the story that he's telling that he forgets to use his fork and eats spaghetti with his fingers. Not wanting to wash the table-cloth every day, but loath to replace it with a bland or tacky picnic table plastic one for the time being, I jumped eagerly on the solution: "why don't we just buy this clear vinyl table cloth and use it to cover the nice one?"

And so we did. It looks wonderful. I get to have my pretty cloth on the table, and the kitchen looks so put-together. I don't have to do laundry every day to get yogurt, spaghetti sauce, muffin crumbs and unnamed goo, not to mention marker, glue, crayon and play-doh out of the cloth. I just get out the damp sponge and wipe. Voila!

Of course, there is the very real anxiety that I have just, in one fell swoop of practicality, become one of those crazy 1970s housewives who thought that her couches actually looked GOOD coated in clear plastic (nevermind that you couldn't sit on the stuff without sliding off) and who valued the practicality of cleanliness so much that the grossness of committing a clear aesthetic crime was completely erased.

But I can't help it. I love the clear vinyl on my kitchen table.

What say you? Should I hang my head in reasonable mortification for becoming the epitome of tacky tacky ticky tack? Or is there some way to redeem this choice so that I can still think of my brand new kitchen as modern and pretty?