Ingredients for a great party

No one would ever call the Hamptons party animals, but we are trying to squeeze every entertaining opportunity out of this season when we are all here this last year. As we were beginning the cleanup tonight, chaos reigning around us, Julie, the best party-thrower I have ever known, said she was taking notes and asked what were the ingredients for a successful party. Here are some I can think of right off:

1) Invite terrific people (we are having three different parties with different (sometimes intersecting) groups). Be flexible with your invitation list and let it open up for extras. We started with 18 (seven of them children 8 and under) and in various stages did the “The more, the merrier” thing and ended up with 29 (11 of them children 8 and under).
2) If you are going to have children, have a one your own, Karen, who still love toys and happens to have a huge Rubbermaid tub of playmobiles. With enough playmobiles to stock a small toy store, you hardly need other entertainment.
3) Plan a simple menu. We had two kinds of lasagne (as Chuck said, wrongly!!, “the veggie lasagne and the good stuff”—Ellen’s veggie pesto l. recipe is superb), salad, bread and….a
4) Chocolate fountain. Brought by Julie herself! It puts a great party over the edge to fantastic. Which leads to this corollary, # 5.
5) Don’t mind wiping chocolate up off the kitchen floor several times or off of happy children’s faces or off your own blouse (later on).
6) Have a baby learn to crawl during the party. In fact, Karen, who mailed her Reader’s Digest Condensed list of Christmas wishes to Santa when she got home, admitted that watching Ben crawling was better than any toys.
7) Have an oldest daughter bring her coffeemaker (we don’t drink coffee and still only have the percolator given to us as a wedding present.) Jenny was busy keeping adults happy with her good coffee choices.
8) Have a middle daughter bring her recorder. The better to play sweet Christmas carols with
9) The other necessity for a great party—a pianist who led us in fun Christmas songs and then many carols. We had four pianists to chose from, Julie, Becca, Annie and Jenny, but it was Julie who played.
10) Have an advent yule log with 22 candles lit during the carol singing. Then 10 children took turns blowing out the candles (not the crawler). Oh, the joy! We will be scraping candle wax off the piano until July (by then it will be Jenny’s job). One of the young dads is going to be making a similar advent log for his family.

We hope your Christmas parties as are wonderful as ours. Now to all a good night. I have to get up early to get the next (and our last) one ready. This one is for international students…with soups, breads, and peppermint stick ice cream; Christmas Eve service; and then back for games. Before that, one other Christmas tradition: making Grandma Hampton’s breakfast sweet rolls for Christmas morning while listening to the Festival of 9 Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge on the radio.

Ornaments

After Karen arrived home, we put the ornaments on the tree. May I say to my young readers (whoever one or two of you there are) that you ought to discretely date your ornaments. They will trigger more memories than most anything else; long after memories of this year's "must have" gifts have faded (Karen is always asking, "Do you remember what you got me in 1993? -- or whatever -- and of course I cannot, nor would I want to) the ornaments will bring back special moments. Like the paper ones I cut from Christmas cards when we were first married and had no money for ornaments; like the glittered styrofoam Christmons we made with the (Lutheran missionary) Schmidts the year after we both returned from Liberia; like the ones Grandma Settergren gave the girls, especially the elaborately decorated eggs (Grandma H wasn't into such frivolity); like the ones I cross-stitched for everyone the year we lived in Cambridge; like the ones we exchanged with our next door neighbor when the kids were little; like the ones we bought in central Europe during our grand Christmas tour of 1995. That brings me to this year's ornament. I decided we needed a Wooster keepsake, so over to the bookstore I went and this is what I found. Perfect for Christmas 2007 nostalgia.

When seasons collide

It seems appropriate to post this on the last day of fall. The leaves will be haunting us until spring. So (if I can post two pictures on one post), here are the leaves that fell after the second pickup just before Thanksgiving, carpeting our deck beautifully. The city promised a third pickup. The students returned to rake again. Then we had a snowfall. After that one had nearly melted, I raked in several shorter sessions and got everything (including a good portion of our neighbor's front yard) down to the street. Then came another, more substantial, snowfall. The hearty city folk persisted, wanting to finish picking up by Christmas. The leaf truck came around Tuesday but what I had raked to my neighbor's street was so scattered out that they did not perceive there to be leaves under the snow. Therefore, as the snow melts all that hard work will just scatter around our yard for weeks....(plus what is still falling in our own yard). Has there ever been a season like this? Or do I just care more this year?

Of pancakes, tubas and nostalgia

The son of a former neighbor, a senior at Wooster High, is taking a college calc. class this semester and so sold Chuck some tickets to the annual Wooster Music Parent pancake breakfast. Since pairing that event with the annual Tuba Christmas, it has become their best fundraiser, surpassing even the fruit sale (ah, the fruit sale and my first experience with Excel spreadsheets....). We lined up with the rest of Wooster, including many members of the Red Hat Club (whose desire for eccentricity is surpassed only by their conformity to the uniform, but that is another story), and got our brunch this morning. Then Chuck wanted to duck into the auditorium where the rehearsal for the Tuba Christmas was going on. One year he managed to play in that, but it comes at a particularly busy time of the school year and so he didn't continue. Mr. Bennett, the assistant band director, who arrived at Wooster High School with Jenny in 1987, spied us in the back and came over to invite Chuck to join them. He'd round up a tuba for him, he said, and "who was doing 'error calculations'?" for the growling joy-filled occasion. Alas, Chuck said no, the rest of the day's errands and rehearsals in mind. I'd have loved a bit of such spontaneity but I don't play a lower brass instrument. What blew me away is that Mr. Bennett (I don't suppose he'd mind if I called him Doug at this point) remembered us, asked after our girls, and even said he'd let Chuck sit with the other Michiganders--Mr. Bennett and Mr. Adams being huge Ohio State fans. He must have interacted with hundreds of music parents since the late 80s. He told us thank you for sending such wonderful children their way....oh, nostalgia attack! I fear many more in heading our way in the next few months.

Lotsa Leaves, take two, or three, or....

If it seems to you that I have an obsession with leaves, well, you'd be right. If there's any year that we must have a winter/spring yard free of them, it's this year in which we will be trying to sell the house. However, the warmer than usual fall meant that the leaves dropped late. Thankfully, the city service people are coming around a third time because ours are not the only leaves not to cooperate with their fixed schedule. Therefore, late last week on some cold but dry days, I got out and raked them into piles for the students come return once again (wonderful students that they are) to get out to the front street via our tarp. Chuck did the front yard with me on Friday but he was gone all day Saturday proctoring the Putnam Exam, so I ventured forth three times on Saturday to do the huge back yard and probably half of my to-the-west neighbor's front yard. Peculiarly, he has not done any raking this fall (and in our "neighborhood" you don't ask if there's illness or something....) and his oak tree will provide enough leaves to cover our yard all winter. On Sunday a small army of students showed up in a cold drizzly rain and in no time deposited the leaves on the piles along the street. Since then, we've had a wind storm and some snow. The white stuff covers the huge piles and what has again swirled across the yard. Hopefully next week, the piles will be gone?

And in the meantime, the snow reminds me that the entertaining season is upon me. We were having lunch with our church small group when the students arrived, their annual caroling party is Friday (that's the biggie) and thus it begins. I can't hold a candle though to our new friend Hannah (a teaching post doc here)....here is the web address of her blog on which she posted pictures of some of the 17 kinds of Christmas cookies she made with her sister during Thanksgiving break. 17 kinds! What skill. http://hannahscookies.blogspot.com Admire them with me :) as I make chocolate chip cookies with red and green m&ms for the caroling party.