Let me just say there is nothing that strikes more fear into my
heart than wintertime. Oh, not because of holiday shopping or the
cold weather or the crowds. It’s the entertaining.
Let me just say there is nothing that strikes more fear into my heart than wintertime. Oh, not because of holiday shopping or the cold weather or the crowds. It’s the entertaining.
Let me explain. You see, entertaining is much easier during the summer mainly because you can get away with a lot more. As soon as the guests arrive, you can herd them to the backyard, hand them a barbecued hotdog on a paper plate and call it a success. Not so in winter. There is something about the onset of winter that causes people’s expectations to rise. I mean, suddenly, the very same people who happily ate corn on the cob with their fingers while lounging around the pool, now expect to use things like china plates and silver cutlery. Ha! Ha! I say.
Sure, there are those of type of people who can throw a dinner party for 40 of their closest friends with real napkins and matching plates and acceptable forks. We all know people who toss around terms like “broulette” and “sauté” in everyday conversation and who own accessories like cruets and silver salad tongs.
But me, I am not this sort of person.
I am the type of person who invites 12 people over for dinner, then opens the cupboard an hour or so before they arrive and is shocked to find seven good water glasses, five dinner plates, six wine glasses, four presentable forks, and eight knives that haven’t been gnawed up by the garbage disposal.
It’s times like this that I wish I were more like my organized friend Julie. She is an avid believer in potlucks. When she has a dinner party, everyone is assigned a dessert or hors d’oeuvres or a pasta dish. She is never caught unprepared. But, face it, in order to pull something like this off, it takes absolute clear-headedness and hours of detailed planning. You don’t want to end up with five trays of lemon crisps and no main course. Or three apple pies and eight loaves of bread. With pressure like that, you might as well spend all that mental energy cooking the dinner yourself.
But as far as winter entertaining goes, something else strange happens. For reasons I can’t explain, my once quaint and cozy house becomes a mere hovel, my kitchen tools laughable, and my entire reputation as a respectable middle-class member of society nothing but a sordid sham. In other words, Dinner Party Panic sets in.
And everybody knows there’s only one way to get it out of your system: clean. First I quickly wipe out the crumbs in the silverware drawer in case someone opens the drawer to find the butter knife. Then I clean out the refrigerator in case someone accidentally wanders by and glimpses in while the door is open. Next, I feel around under the sofa cushions for old French fries and then vacuum underneath all of the furniture in case someone gets lost, wanders upstairs, and looks under the beds for, say, a pair of slippers. (Hey, it could happen.) And the cleaning scenarios just go on and on.
If I’m lucky, I finish about 20 minutes before the guests arrive. That’s just enough time to phone in my order to the Chinese take-out place and go to my neighbor Julie’s house to borrow her set of good dishes. And then to Ellen’s for some extra chairs and silverware. I don’t think of it as imposing, though. I think of it more as payback for all of the paper cups and napkins I loaned to them during the summer.
So why, you ask, if entertaining is so stressful, do I keep on doing it? Because, soon after my guests arrive a funny thing happens: I begin to relax and enjoy myself. Who knows why this happens? But if you ask me, it’s just the nature of wintertime entertaining.
