A ladies luncheon at my house. Soup and sandwiches, and I never bothered to hide the water bottles.
A few years ago, I was at a party and noticed a woman standing near the fireplace holding an empty glass. Nobody spoke to her for twenty minutes. I know that because I kept an eye on her the whole time I was talking with someone else. The hostess was in her kitchen plating shrimp, and that is where she stayed most of the night. I excused myself from my conversation, walked over and introduced myself.
When a hostess focuses more on entertaining than hospitality, the party will often fall flat. Her house was beautiful, but this is not what anybody remembered. Entertaining says, “Look at me. Look what I did.” Hospitality says, “How may I serve you?”
I have spent most of this year writing about the table and why it matters. Now we start getting into the how. You may agree with every word I have written about the table, but if we do not learn how to practice hospitality, then we end up leaving a woman holding an empty glass in our living room. Believing in the power of the table is the first step in creating a healthy home, but knowing how to run the evening is a different skill that must be learned.
Most of what follows I learned by watching others, along with my own mistakes over the years, when we put entertaining above hospitality.
Before the Doorbell Rings
1. The Huddle. The pitfall is assuming everyone helping you knows what to do. Having helping hands so you can delegate some of your responsibilities as the hostess is invaluable. But it must be done with strong communication. Before guests arrive, gather everyone who is pitching in and hand each person a written list. Suzy: front door. Take coats, umbrellas, handbags. Accept hostess gifts. Samuel: make sure no guest stands anywhere for more than a few minutes without being offered a drink. Create a full list of delegated items and hand each person their list. This way you can relax knowing these tasks are being successfully handled.
2. Show Time. The pitfall is still curling your hair when the doorbell rings. Be dressed and finished thirty minutes before your start time. When guests walk into a house where the hostess is running frantic, they feel like more of a burden than a blessing. When this happens, often guests try to pitch in to help. This means you have inadvertently put your guest to work. Your job at 6:30, before the doorbell rings, is to have nothing left to do (except pulling out a few warm trays of biscuits!).
The First Hour
3. Warm Welcome. The pitfall is a doorbell nobody answers. Assign one person to the front door for the first hour. Her job is to open it and take whatever people are carrying, and to accept any hostess gift graciously. A guest should never stand on your porch wondering whether to ring twice.
4. Hostess Gifts. The pitfall is making a fuss over the wine someone brought. Say thank you, tell her you can’t wait to open it after everyone leaves, and set it quietly out of sight. Somewhere in that room is a woman who came empty-handed, and you don’t want to make anyone else uncomfortable. A hostess gift is between you and the giver, and it should stay that way.
5. Space It Out. The pitfall is a crowd of people wedged into your entryway while the back of the house sits empty. Three placements in your home fix the problem of an overcrowded entry. As the hostess, do not stand at the front door. If you do, every arriving guest stops to greet you and a receiving line backs up onto your porch. Upon arrival, most guests greet the host, and find the bar and food. So work with that progression. Put the bar in a back room or outside. Put the food in a separate location, but also towards the back. By positioning these stations in different rooms and the hosts near the back, the party spreads out on its own and leaves breathing room.
6. Drinks and Hors d’oeuvres. The pitfall is a guest standing there with nothing in her hand. Every person should be offered something to eat and drink within a minute of arriving. I do it two ways at once: stations for food and drinks in fixed spots, plus someone walking the rooms with a tray of water, wine, and a few hors d’oeuvres. Your helpers can be a professional hospitality company or the high schoolers down the street. Both work.
At the Table
Everything up to now has been about your house. This section is about the table itself. Whether it is the table your family eats at on Tuesday or the one your guests gather around on Saturday, it is the same table, and it carries the same importance. The next five pitfalls are what happens once everyone sits down.
7. Timeline. The pitfall is a cocktail hour that runs too long. Enjoying drinks before a seated dinner should last thirty to forty-five minutes. If your invitation said cocktails at seven, then dinner is on the table by 7:45. If you let happy hour go much past this, your guests may become hangry, and an hour of drinking on an empty stomach never ends well.
8. Mix and Mingle. The pitfall is your own best friends. It is so easy to end up in a corner with the three women you would love spending the most time with. When I host, I barely speak to my closest friends all night, because I know they can take care of themselves. I keep my focus on the people who don’t know anyone. Move room to room, group to group. If someone is monopolizing your time, say, “Excuse me a moment, I need to check on something in the kitchen,” and exit the conversation.
9. Seating. The pitfall is letting people choose. The first thing a guest does when she reaches the table is look for a clue about where to sit, and if nothing on the table guides her to her seat, she stands there feeling uneasy. Yes, place cards are necessary. Write them the day before, not while people are eating your cheese straws. Left alone, two shy people will end up side by side and that corner of your dinner party will remain quiet all throughout the meal. I’ll talk about this in greater detail in a later post, because there is an art to learning how to work a seating chart.
10. Late Arrivals. The pitfall is holding dinner. If a guests calls about a flat tire, give them fifteen minutes, then seat your table and serve the meal. When the late guest walks in, hand them whatever course is currently on the table. If you’re on the entree and they missed the salad, they missed the salad. Be gracious and never make your guest feel badly they were late. They are already the most stressed person in your house, so show them grace. But do not let twelve people’s food go cold because one was tardy, regardless of the reason.
11. Easy Conversation. The pitfall is a lull at the table with nobody to fill it. Come with two or three questions in your pocket. My husband likes to ask, “If you could take one more vacation, and it had to be somewhere you’ve already been, where would you go?” Mine is simply, “Tell me about yourself.” It’s open enough that a guest can answer however she wishes, whether it be about her job or with the movie she saw Tuesday night.
Getting Everyone Home
12. Party Favors. The pitfall is the guest who slips out while you’re pouring coffee. Before you ring the dinner bell and call everyone to the table, set the party favors in a basket by the front door. You think you will remember as guests are departing for the evening, but if the little trinkets are not already in place, they will be forgotten in the hustle and bustle of all the good-byes.
13. Coffee Time. The pitfall is one pot of regular at nine o’clock. Offer coffee with dessert, caffeinated and decaf both, with cream, sugar, and sweetener already out. Half your table stopped drinking caffeine after four and will gladly take decaf if it exists.
14. After-Dinner Drinks. The pitfall is staying put. When dessert and coffee are finished, move everyone to another room. This allows guests to stretch their legs and enjoy another environment, while also giving them a chance to speak to other guests at the party. Doing this one act breathes life back into the dinner party as most people can become drowsy after a big meal.
15. Saying Goodbye. The pitfall is having no way to end. Most guests leave thirty to forty-five minutes after dinner. If your guests are just now settling in and don’t seem eager to leave (even if you communicated what time the party ended), then begin talking in the past tense: “This was such a wonderful evening, I’m so glad we could all get together.” Psychologically, this signals the party is coming to a close. The best way to avoid guests that overstay their welcome? Tell your guests when you invite them, on the front end, what time the party ends. “Come at seven, we’ll eat at 7:30, and we’ll wrap up around ten.”
I learned that one the hard way. We hosted a party at Christmas and I put a start time on the invitation and no end time. Everyone left, I got into my pajamas, and my husband and I climbed in bed to watch a movie. The doorbell rang. Standing on our porch were party hoppers who had seen the cars still lining our street and assumed we were going strong. We laughed about it, but I learned to start putting end times on all my invitations. Guests like to know what to expect. Don’t leave them guessing.
16. Close the Bar. The pitfall is not knowing how to clear a room. If you told people the party ends at 10 p.m., and it is now 10:30 p.m., close the bar. I promise you, it works.
17. Keep It Intentional. The pitfall underneath almost every mishap is making your guest guess. When the invitation arrives, what to wear, whether to respond, when to come, when to go home, all of that is your job, as the hostess, to communicate. A guest who knows what’s expected of her will be relaxed, and a relaxed guest is the best guest.
We have a motto in our family: to be unclear is to be unkind.
None of these seventeen pitfalls are difficult to manage, but if we ignore these seemingly small details, they add up to whether your guests spend the night checking the time or pulling up another chair because they feel so welcomed. Anybody can get people to sit down at their table. The work is turning your table into a place where every person there feels genuinely at home. Learning these 17 pitfalls is the difference between a woman who eats her dinner and goes home, and a woman who is still in her chair at ten o’clock asking when you are doing this again.
Together with you,
Lisa Lou
