The Yule Shindig: pt.1

Dec 20

How to get ready for a party.

This is pretty much the only party you ever have, and it’s at Christmas, so you have plenty of leisure time to get ready.  No pressure.

1. First think to yourself, “Shoot.  These are all my buddies.  All I really have to do is vacuum just before they get here.”  Then, a week before the party,  look around at your house – the stacks of books in every corner, the dust bunnies stuck to the lamp (nostalgic for the old, richer days when we had somebody come in to clean every two weeks), the festoons of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling fan – and realize it’s going to take a leeetle more than vacuuming.

2. Clean the house.  Do it at the same time you are doing the year end accounting. But first, install a new operating system that renders all your good old familiar software witless.  And get puppies.  You have to get puppies to really make all this work.  And forget to call your good friend, the caterer, with whom you have an under-the-table arrangement that allows you to provide YOUR part of the fabulous party spread without entering the kitchen.  Oh yeah – and finish up all the Christmas details you kept thinking you’d do later  – because you suddenly realize that later is now yesterday.

Really, this part of the thing isn’t so bad, because it turns out that you don’t get much done till the night before, and then the whole thing becomes, per force, a fun family project.  Maybe just fun because everybody else has to be with you while you’re balancing at the top of the step ladder, vacuuming the ceiling fan.  Do not ask everybody else if they thought it was fun.

3. On the afternoon of party day, go out to feed the horses with full intentions of coming home to take a shower in plenty of time for your hair to dry before the party starts.  For a change.  Get to the barn and start slinging hay – and only realize after about fifteen minutes that your gigantic colt is not only not interested in food, he’s hiding in the jail, sort of half-heartedly kicking at his stomach.  Which means he is colic-ing, which means he could actually be dead in three hours.  Or not.  Depending – which depending you could kind of work out if you had three hours to hang around and watch him and walk him.

Consider how long it will take to hitch up the trailer and drive two towns south to the vet.  Consider that the puppies are still out in the yard at the house and that nobody is home to watch them or help with the trailer because everybody else is out running last minutes errands.  Call the vet and be surprised and almost moved to tears when they say that they’d be GLAD to send out Dr. Mike for a farm visit.  And he actually shows up within twenty minutes and in typically good spirits, sedates the colt, runs one inch plastic tubing up the colt’s nostril all the way into his stomach and pumps the colt full of oil and water.

“I think he’ll be fine!” the good Doc says as he and his cheerful assistant jump into the huge red truck – which might as well be a sleigh today—and takes off down the driveway, waving.  As it turns out, he is right.

4.  One hour later, your hair will be dripping wet, but your daughter will have set the table like a pro, and the under-the-table food will have shown up at your door in the hands of beautiful young friends, and the house will shine like a Christmas jewel – as long as you leave the ceiling lights off and depend heavily on several strings of Christmas lights.

And that’s how you do it.