Dinner Parties
When we were first married, we had a lot of dinner parties. They weren’t potlucks — I did all of the cooking — but they weren’t sit-at-the-table parties because we only had four chairs. And they were all metal folding chairs. People plopped down on the sofa or the floor with their plates, and we’d hang out all night, eating and listening to music and talking.
Then we moved to a different place, and we held one or two of those old-style, sit-on-the-floor dinners in our basement. But at some point, we graduated to a smaller group—usually just a handful of people—all around the table. I came to think of the floor dinners as part of new adulthood and the table dinners as part of being a grownup.
The dinner parties dried up entirely during COVID and haven’t returned.
I miss those dinner parties on the floor. Watching where you stepped so you didn’t knock over a glass. People constantly shifting to a new space and talking to a new person when they returned from refilling their plate. I don’t know why I ever thought the floor wasn’t grownup.
Dinner parties are the thing I miss the most from pre-COVID.
2 comments
Your memories of dinner parties on the floor reminds me of being at my grandparents’ farm when I was a kid. They had a tiny two-bedroom bungalow, and there would regularly be a crowd of people there. When holidays came around, like Christmas, Easter, birthdays, there would be 30, 40 relatives or more crammed in there — aunts, uncles, cousins. The floor would be covered with kids (my sister, cousins & me) sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV with plates in our laps. After dinner, we would go downstairs & play in the basement, which relieved the congestion upstairs a little, I guess. Sometimes I miss those days — but sometimes I think about it and wonder, yikes, how did my grandmother do it??? (She died at the relatively young age of 68… hmmm….)
I used to have some couple friends over for dinner when we were first married — lived in an apartment in the city. Then we bought a house and moved further out to the suburbs, which was less convenient for many of the friends we used to have over (and vice versa) — also, our dining nook in the kitchen was rather cramped, and the designated dining room wasn’t much larger better (and we didn’t have a proper dining set anyway). So I kind of got out of practice with entertaining. My FIL was also a very picky eater, and I obviously could not cook Italian, at least not the way my dh’s family did, so I felt very self-conscious having them over for dinner, other than to order pizza in or something like that. Sigh.
It’s worth holding onto the memories, but it’s not always good to t try going back. We, with my BIL and SIL, had fond memories of Friday nights eating fish and chips on the floor, with a bottle of bubbly wine (definitely NOT champagne! lol). Many years later, my husband and his brother wanted to recreate it, with the same wine. My SIL and I agreed to the fish and chips, but decided we’d drink different wine, after a sip of the old stuff! The memories were good. But we all agreed, recreating is not recommended!
Over the years I’ve had lots of dinner parties. We called them dinner parties at first, and in the 80s/early 90s, it was almost a case of “competitive dinner parties” amongst older colleagues. Now I just call it “having people over for dinner” and it is all much more casual and relaxed. I like cooking something special (I have the time) and often new, and I really like making a nice dessert (sweet tooth), which I rarely do just for the two of us. This year, every dinner with guests is with a particular north African inspired dish. I figure if I make it for everyone this year, I won’t get confused about who has had it and who hasn’t!
Leave a Comment