entertaining fret or fret about entertaining

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Summer Social Life

At long last, I am listening (with great pleasure) to Ina Garten’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens. The whole book is fascinating and enjoyable, but one part so far that’s stood out to me was about entertaining. Ina is talking about how she loves to entertain – and she shares a lot of fun “lessons learned” over time, like don’t make individual omelets for every person at the dinner party – and at one point, she mentions that she spends the day after entertaining lying on the couch, exhausted, swearing she will never have another dinner party again. Relatable much??? If even The Ina Garten gets worn out by entertaining, well, that makes me feel a little better about how I feel about having guests. 

At the ripe old age of 44, I continue to struggle with the conflicting desire to be social and be solitary. Specifically, I would really, really like to be the type of person who entertains… but entertaining stresses me the eff out. 

We have a great house for entertaining. We have a great outdoor space. We have plenty of room for people. What we don’t have is ease and comfort with bringing people together. 

My husband and I have family friends who are exactly what I would like to be, in terms of hosts. They seem to always be hosting parties or get-togethers. They do marshmallow roasts and pizza nights and cookie baking parties. They host an annual Christmas celebration. They invite us over frequently, often the day before or day of the event, and I don’t know if we’re an afterthought or if they simply decide in the moment that they’re having people over that evening. When we do go – and we always say yes or no, not maybe – there are typically several other families there as well, who come and go at varying times. There’s always an abundance of food, drink options, children running in and out and around the house. The hosts often cook while we’re there, assembling pizzas, grilling meat, making sauce on the stove while guests chat at them from the other side of their kitchen island. It’s chaotic and noisy and people always seem to have a good time.

I could never. It’s just not in my nature. Spontaneity is not my strong suit in general, but when it comes to having people over to my house… no. And so very MANY people? Just. No. 

A few weeks ago, my husband and I made an attempt at semi-spontaneity. We invited friends over for snacks and drinks; they accepted. “Snacks and drinks” is my idea of easy, because – as I have posted before – I fret intensely and at length about what to feed people. We picked up some beer and a bottle of margarita mix. We bought a bunch of fruits and veggies, cheese, crackers, deli meat. I washed all the veggies in advance and then put together a couple of trays with everything on it so that the food would be ready to go when our guests arrived. I did a quick tidy of the house. And then the friends didn’t come over. 

It was FINE. We had Snack Dinner, just the three of us, and watched a movie. But it was kind of a letdown. (Maybe “snacks and drinks” doesn’t sound like enough of a plan to be worthwhile?)

This kind of thing happens, I know it does. I’ve read many articles and memes and blog posts about how millennials and successive generations don’t RSVP and opt out of things at the last minute. I also know that things happen; things come up, kids get crabby, the dog tracks poop through the house and suddenly your Saturday is spent deep cleaning the carpet. 

We had a similar thing happen last weekend. My husband asked if a friend might want to bring his family over to swim, and the friend said yes. We bought food that would be good to eat by the pool, washed and prepped veggies and fruits, cleaned the pool, etc. And then they didn’t respond when my husband reached out. 

This most recent disappointment, I think, was because we tried too hard to be too spontaneous. Saying, “Hey, why don’t you come over this weekend to swim?” is fine, but my husband’s approach was to get in the pool and then text the friend and say, “we’re in the pool, come over” while my approach was to pick a day and time in advance so everyone can PLAN. We ended up doing a hybrid of these things, where he reached out the morning of and said, “we plan on hopping in the pool around X time, so come on over.” The friend got back to my husband several hours after X time, and said, “Oh, hey, we ended up doing something else.” Which is FINE, I get it, but also we sat around all day not knowing if or when they would show up. I think that could have been avoided if we’d had specific plans. 

I hope this doesn’t come across as complaining. (Truthfully, I was relieved, in both instances, that the plans didn’t pan out.) I am using these two examples to show how impossible it feels to invite people over. You plan, and it doesn’t work out. You try to be spontaneous, and it doesn’t work out. Or sometimes it DOES work out and there’s a flurry of planning and prepping and cleaning and the stress of having people in my space and do they think my house is clean enough and is the food I made good enough and is everyone having fun and why does every word that comes out of my mouth sound stupid and are they staying too long/long enough etc. etc. etc. 

What I think would be WORSE would be to have spontaneous plans and not be prepared. Okay, I wrote that sentence, read it, thought THAT IS RIDICULOUS you cannot be prepared to be spontaneous, deleted it, then put it back. Because that is my problem in a nutshell. I don’t typically have things on hand to be able to be truly spontaneous. Do you? Like, if you were at your kids’ baseball game and you ran into friends, could you say, “Hey, come back with us to our house!” and then have them over without any sort of pre-planning? I don’t think I would have food. I mean, today I do, but that’s because I have all the veggies and deli meat and cheese we bought for our failed spontaneous swim day. That’s not normal. Or, on a normal week, I might have a bag of cut-up cauliflower and a pint of tomatoes and a pint of blueberries… but that doesn’t seem like enough to feed people if they randomly show up at your house. 

Jill linked to a post by Katherine Goldstein about “deep casual hosting” that I read with keen interest. The article gives eight tips for how you can entertain while spending more time on connection and less time on preparation. I love that framing. That is, after all, WHY I want to entertain. I want to spend time with dear friends, deepen friendships, and create new relationships. Does a part of me want people to comment, after the fact, about how beautiful my home is or how delicious the meal was? Of course. But when I think about what I really want people to think and feel after they spend time with me, I’d much prefer they say, “Suzanne and Husband make us feel so welcome and comfortable.” One of the most complimentary things I feel about a person is that they are easy to be around, and I don’t think I am particularly easy to be around. Something to strive for.

Goldstein’s most appealing and simultaneously most terrifying suggestion is the one to embrace last minute invitations. The idea is that people will have a more concrete idea of their plans at the last minute, and that the spontaneity of the ask will set a low bar for expectations. Goldstein also mentions a bonus, which is that your friends may feel less intimidated about reciprocating. 

A friend I haven’t seen in ages texted me one Thursday saying, “Hey, I know it’s last minute, but are you free this weekend?” We were free on Saturday, and asked her and her spouse to come over. Because it was such a quick ask and because we’d had plans on the Friday night, I felt zero pressure to do anything. We drank wine and chatted and then the guys went and picked up takeout and it was very low-stress and simple and enjoyable. In retrospect, it feels like it worked out because we’d had plans the night before, so the house was cleaner than usual, and because they are already very good friends whom I don’t feel the need to impress. But maybe it worked out because that’s the ideal way to entertain. 

The thing is, I don’t know that I can engineer future experiences to happen in the same way, because a) the exact confluence of factors that made it so seamless may never happen again and b) trying to engineer a similar outcome is the same as planning which is the very thing that causes stress.

Yet I keep coming back to that same ridiculous thought: how can I plan to be spontaneous? Surely there are ways to do that. Keeping my house tidy enough that I won’t be embarrassed by guests is one strategy. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just neat enough. But what about the food? Goldstein’s tip is to keep it simple; she focuses on making more of what she’s going to cook anyway. What does that MEAN? Does that mean running into a friend at camp and saying, “Hey, come over tomorrow night” and then going out and buying more of the ingredients for tomorrow’s dinner, whatever it was going to be? I have no trouble ordering pizza or picking up sandwiches or whatever once in a while, but I also don’t want to do that on the regular. I have some “go-to” meals I feel fairly comfortable serving to guests, but I also get tired of them and don’t want to serve them every time. My freezer is full of ingredients, but that requires work (not to mention creativity) which seems antithetical to “deep casual hosting.” And also I hate cooking in front of people; now THAT’S stressful. 

And what about the guests who DO expect a more elevated experience? One friend and his husband are always putting on elaborate dinner parties, where they assign seating and make gourmet food… He’s assured me he doesn’t expect the same thing, but… is that really true? Or what about my parents and my in-laws and their friends, whom we occasionally entertain? Maybe “deep casual hosting” doesn’t have to extend to Every Single Time You Have Someone Over??? 

As usual, I am wildly overthinking this. There’s nothing to be done, I don’t think, aside from being an entirely different person. 

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Deep Into Birthday Party Planning

We are doing a sleepover for Carla’s birthday this year. After all of my fretting over the guest list, we settled on a compromise: inviting a slightly larger number of people than I’m comfortable with, including the kids who’d invited Carla to their parties, and giving people the option to choose whether they are staying overnight or not. (So far, it’s about half and half.) I feel good about this; Carla seems to feel good about this. I am resigned to not sleeping, or at least sleeping very poorly. The one thing I have left to figure out is if and how and when to clarify that this is a no-screens party. (By “no screens” I mean nothing besides the basement TV and sanctioned Disney/Netflix movies.) 

On the “if” side, I am leaning pretty heavily toward yes. There are so many things for kids to do that don’t involve screens, and yet we allllllll get pulled into our phones. Even those of us with fully formed frontal cortexes (cortices?). Judgment is not great among many pre-teens, my kid included, and whatever modicum of judgment does exist seems to fall asleep around ten pm even if the kid remains awake, and also group judgment is always less than the sum of its parts. I’ve read too many horror stories and cautionary tales and heard too many warnings from other parents and therapists to feel comfortable with letting a smartphone run wild in my house overnight. I do realize this is controversial. If your kid has a smartphone, it’s likely in part because you feel like your kid is mature enough to manage a smartphone. And yet… when there’s a group of kids, it seems all too easy for group chats or TikTok scrolling to come into play and making poor choices is so very easy when you are twelve and surrounded by giggling overtired twelve year-olds.  

So: No screens. How and when do I share this information? I feel like it’s important to do so up front; some parents whose kids have cellphones expect the phones to be available if they need to contact them. But there may also be value in simply saying to the kids as they come in, “Please stow your cellphones here for the rest of the party. If you need to contact your parents for any reason, let me know and I’ll make your phone available for you to call them in private.” If I tell parents up front, maybe they wouldn’t even send their kid with a phone. And if I tell kids on the spot, they might simply pretend they don’t have a phone on them. If you’ve had experience with this, on either side of the phone-haver/phone-confiscater side, I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

Why am I hosting a sleepover party again?????

Let’s fret about more frivolous aspects of the party planning.

Theme and Decor

Carla requested a water theme for her party this year. Finding décor and coming up with favor ideas was slightly tricky (do I give everyone a water bottle in a favor bag? a LifeStraw? is everything just… blue?) so I went back to her and she conceded to including some delicate nods to “ocean” and even “beach” if necessary. Much easier. (Although last year’s theme was Beach, so we don’t want to replicate it too completely.)

I found some ocean-water themed plates/cups/tablecloths and matching goodie bags. For favors, I’ll give the kids each a little seashell bracelet and this mini starfish “hug.” Maybe some seashell stickers, too. 

Cake

Carla requested multi-colored vanilla cupcakes with cream cheese buttercream. She and I settled on this inspiration for the decoration and I ordered some edible seashells to put on top. Although I’m sure I can find a way to screw them up, they seem relatively simple.

Treasure Hunt (Again)

Last year, I made an epic treasure hunt for the birthday party. It was a ton of work but it was a lot of fun, and Carla has asked if I’ll do another one this year. Spend hours on a project that will be appreciated by fewer than ten people for approximately thirty minutes if I’m lucky? SURE. 

I’m all set on the clues for things inside the house, but I’m trying to come up with some outdoor clues. (My goal is to make the kids go up and down the stairs a million times, and run around the neighborhood a million times, in order to tire them out so they SLEEP.) I may even ask a neighbor or two if I can put a clue in their mailboxes. Ideas are WELCOME. Although if your idea is to look online, I have already done that; the pickins’ are slim.

I’m also looking for ideas for the prize. Last year, based on feedback from my lovely and brilliant commenters, the prize was $5 Starbucks gift cards. (There were three teams, but the teams all had to work together to solve the final puzzle and find the prize.) This year, I would like to switch it up but also keep it to $5 or under. For marital harmony. 

Okay, after searching the internet, I feel like a gift card is the way to go. If I don’t do Starbucks, what should I do? Local ice cream place? Local donut shop? Claire’s? Five bucks doesn’t go very far at many places. 

Logistics

Is this all I’m fretting about? Well, I am fretting quite a bit about logistics: cupcake baking and decorating, decorating decorating, driving Carla to and from camp, getting home in time for guests to arrive, somehow getting the fast food Carla requested to our house, accomplishing treasure hunt, eating, swimming, and movie in a relatively short period of time, getting children to SLEEP, and then getting these same non-sleeping children AWAKE and through breakfast in time for their parents to pick them up. Well. It’s best not to think too hard about SOME things, lest one finds oneself hyperventilating into a sock whilst curled into the fetal position under a bed.

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Dinners This Week, Dinner Party Fret

After a very indulgent week of birthdays and holidays and houseguests, I am ready to scale back to the simplest type of meal, which for me means a week of Protein + Veggie dinners. Tonight, I think, we will be dining on Chicken + Broccoli because that’s what I have in the fridge. 

However, I have also briefly lost my mind and planned not one but TWO dinner parties for consecutive weekends. This always sounds so fun in the abstract. I am feeling more settled in our house and it truly is a great space for entertaining – our back yard is especially entertaining-friendly, when the weather is pleasant. We have friends and family visiting from out of town and it feels right and good to invite them over for dinner. I want to do this. I am looking forward to ti. And yet, when I get down to the nitty gritty of Hosting People for Dinner, I fall right back into the old conundrum of WHAT IN THE WIDE WILD WORLD DO I FEED PEOPLE? 

You know I like to cook! To the extent that any human can enjoy planning meals day after day after day, I enjoy it. I am not, however, a particularly good cook. My husband is the type of person who will eat almost anything, so I have no real gauge of whether anything I make appeals beyond my particular picky palate. 

When it comes to hosting people, I want something that I can prepare – almost totally – in advance. I do not like people helping me in the kitchen, and making sure everything is nearly done before they arrive makes this a non-issue. I want something fairly foolproof, since our guests are not regulars at our dinner table; I don’t mind, so much, experimenting on my parents or even my in-laws because I know they will come back, and they also have prior experiences against which to weigh this one. But the dinner guests we’re hosting over the next couple of weeks are NOT regulars; in fact, this is not only everyone’s first time at my house, but their first time eating anything I’ve made, ever. 

The things that come to mind are simple, everyone-likes-them meals like tacos or burgers. And yet I feel like those are TOO SIMPLE?! We have been to dinner at one of these people’s houses before, and they made us grilled steaks, which seems MUCH fancier to me than tacos. It feels like we should respond in kind??? This is so dumb. 

I feel like the most obvious answer is GRILL SOME MEAT, but our grill is… special. And by special I mean: it cooks everything unevenly, probably due to the fact that the burners light only in the back half of the grill, and sometimes one of the burners won’t light at all, but if even a tiny drop of oil slides off into the flame the resulting flare turns everything in proximity to charcoal. I have been over every inch of this grill, inside and out, and without buying ALL NEW PARTS, I think we are stuck with This Is the Way It Is, and “the way it is” seems to be “highly mediocre slash inedibly charred.” Oh, also, this weekend I opened the grill to turn it on and THERE WAS A MOUSE ON IT, so I think it may be a while before I feel like I have properly sanitized it for food-cooking purposes again. 

Sometimes I turn to salads. In fact, I’ve been turning to salads a lot lately, to the point that my husband is growing weary of our repertoire. 

I don’t want to use our oven, because I will melt. But I am WILLING to use it. Not that I have mastered the way our oven cooks things yet, either. 

These are not the kind of people where “let’s order takeout” would be appropriate; I certainly have friends who would be fine with that, but I think these guests might be a little miffed if I didn’t cook. Hmmm. Maybe I could order some catering and pretend I cooked it???? That feels wildly dishonest but in a possibly-doable way?

You would think that, after a good decade of having people over for dinner and stressing about it in advance, I would have a little stockpile of things I feel comfortable cooking for company. And yet, I don’t even have ONE THING. When I think back on past dinner parties, I see only things that didn’t turn out, or things that don’t seem appropriate for this time of year (chili) or these specific people (tacos). 

This is a question I have asked you many times over the years – and I should probably just go back and read some of those posts, instead of writing the same whine yet again and asking for the exact same advice I’ve never taken before – but what do YOU want to eat when you go to someone’s house? What is YOUR go-to Meal For Company? 

My biggest food fear when going to someone’s house is probably a casserole of some sort. I dislike casseroles, as a rule; too many things mushed together, too squishy. Plus, casseroles often seem to contain tomatoes, which is a food I cannot bear to eat, even out of politeness. So I think my preference when I go TO someone’s house is several discrete things, so I can take what appeals without (hopefully!) hurting anyone’s feelings. Like a protein and a side dish and a salad. So that’s what I like to serve, hoping that everyone will at least find SOMETHING edible. But I also want it to be GOOD, something I like, something the company likes. Argh. 

Should I make tacos? I should probably just make tacos. But maybe I will make balsamic pork instead? It’s easy; I can make it in the crockpot, and most everything else can be made ahead of time. We top it with a variety of toppings (caramelized onions, kalamata olives, feta cheese), which makes it fun. I can serve it with pita and hummus, which most people like. Hmm. Maybe this is a good choice for one of the dinner parties. But what do I for the other one?!?!?