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Table Manners
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Thanksgiving-HoppingIs it OK to hit two dinners in one night? |
Dear Helena,
My wife’s parents live nearby and we committed to spend Thanksgiving with them months ago. But now half my friends have decided that because of high airfares they’re not flying home this year. They’re staying in town and organizing dinners with each other instead. I’d rather go to one of those than spend the whole holiday listening to my father-in-law talking about his job as a copyright lawyer.
So I came up with the perfect solution: stop at one friend’s house for drinks, hit the in-laws, then cruise over to the other group of friends for dessert. My wife wants to see our friends as much as I do, but she thinks it’s rude to show up at her family’s house just for Thanksgiving dinner, even if we schedule a three-hour slot for it. What do you think? Is it OK to go to more than one Thanksgiving celebration in the same day? —Friends Are More Fun
Dear Friends Are More Fun,
Thanksgiving-hopping is common nowadays. One reason is the high divorce rate. When parents host competing celebrations, it’s hard to choose one over the other. Kelley Buhles, a program manager in social finance in San Francisco, says: “My first double Thanksgiving, my sister and I went from a 2 p.m. dinner at my mom’s in Los Altos to a 6 p.m. dinner in Lafayette with my dad’s family. We only ate salad at the second dinner because we were so full, and got in trouble with our grandma for not eating enough. She had purposefully not been told we were on double duty that day.”
Double- or triple-booking might seem like a great way to please everyone—and yourself—but Thanksgiving-hopping may irritate your hosts. “Dropping in on my friends at the end has always pissed my mother off, as in her world Thanksgiving is a strictly family event,” says Buhles. If you stop by just for part of someone’s dinner, it means you won’t be much help with prep, serving, and cleaning up. Wolfing your food to get to your next commitment on time will insult the chef. Thanksgiving is the one dinner of the year when guests are pretty much required to take seconds. And if you leave while other people are still eating, you force them to interrupt their meal to say goodbye to you.
If the occasion were a normal dinner party, it would be OK to allocate a four-hour slot and make plans for later. But Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t always operate on schedule. The turkey might take longer than expected or relatives could be late.
Sure, spending six hours with your family (or with any group of intimates) can be boring and tense at times. But if you cut it short, you forgo important bonding opportunities. Sometimes people are so preoccupied preparing and serving the meal that it’s only after dinner that they are ready for relaxed conversation. Hunker down for the day, and you might find yourself warming to your father-in-law when he does all the dishes, or having a hilarious game of Celebrity with your mother-in-law. By contrast, if you show up at a friend’s place after dinner, you could end up feeling left out. Buhles usually tries to stop by a friend’s after celebrating with both parents, but comments: “Generally everyone is full and perhaps a little tipsy, and it’s just hard to get in on the vibe.”
The Pilgrims most likely didn’t double-book, and neither should you. If you’re torn between your friends and your family, or between different family members, there’s an easy way to have it all: Next year, offer to host.
Table Manners appears every Wednesday. Have a Table Manners question? Email Helena.
agree.
For what it's worth, it depends on what the expectations are in your family. My partner and I are lucky enough to have both of our families in the area, and we love that we get to see both sets of parents on Thanksgiving. They like it too, because we can spend some of the holiday together every year, instead of choosing one each year, or splitting Thanksgiving and Christmas each year, or some other arrangement like many couples have to do. A couple of things help this out: 1) as it happens, my family likes to eat late, and partner's family likes to eat early; 2) the families all get along, and communicate easily, so there's no cloak-and-dagger secrecy or hurt feelings; 3) we're happy to spend 3 hours together each Thanksgiving rather than 6 every other Thanksgiving.
So, I think double booking can actually be a good thing in the right circumstances; in our case it actually brings our families closer together and helps to keep everyone happy. :-)
Let them know that is what you plan to do. See if they care. Help prep/set up the first group and help clean at the next.
Of course it's OK to double-book. Just let people know ahead of time. But, because it's Thanksgiving, the majority of the time should be spent with family. You can party with your friends the other 364 days of the year.
I never thought of how the cook(s) might look forward to visiting after the meal. Just eating and running seems to be using their hospitality and possibly making them feel like they are running a restaurant rather than hosting a special holiday event. My friend Joe who was like a second father to me could pull off the two dinners back in the day. But it helped that he had a really really good appetite and the two feasts were hours apart so he didn't have to rush. I remember him coming to our event first at my grandparents' table and after the meal boasting than in a couple of hours he would be eating turkey again. My eyes would get wide as I would ask him if he was really planning to eat another whole feast, and he assured me he could. He had packed away plenty with us. But he was so inordinately pleased with himself and had such a twinkle in his eye that no one could begrudge him his twin turkeys.
I believe the holiday film, Four Christmas' addresses this hopping dilemma with much humor!!
I often hit two T'day events, but as my family have a tradition of doing a mid-afternoon dinner and my friends prefer an evening get-together there's no conflict. The only hard part is saving some room for an extra dessert at the second party.
I kind of think it's ok to double book family / family events, but family / friends would be trickier. Might reak a little of " I got a better, more fun, offer".
Good job, Helena. A little commitment goes a long way, and ultimately makes the world a better place. The right thing to do isn't always going to be the most tempting.
Thanksgiving is an all-day family event for us. We show up around noon and don't leave until after the sun has gone way, way down. It wouldn't work out for me to try to do dinner and then friends. For other folks, Thanksgiving isn't that long of an event, and hopping parties would be perfectly fine.
The questioner really seems to me to just want the "okay" from others to skip spending time with his father-in-law, not to know whether it is polite to celebrate with multiple people.
I just do whatever I want. If doing what I want makes someone else unhappy, that person doesn't want what's best for me. So, screw 'em.
I have divorced parents, a charming fiance with additional family and older half brothers and sisters from my Dad's first marriage who all host Thanksgiving. And our grandparents refuse to come to a central location for Christmas so we only see them at Thanksgiving. Luckily Mom moved hers to Saturday so as not to compete with Fiance's family, but it sometimes has to be Sunday if WVU plays on Saturday, and she is now normally invited to Fiance's family on Thanksgiving day, but if not because she is the only in my family without SO it causes a lot of trouble and I have to change plans. Dad doesn't really care all that much anymore, but my Brother and I used to be expected to show, and since his kids didn't like my Dad's new wife they host their own to which we are expected to show up there at some point in the evening. Luckily everyone understands and we get to try a little of the best dishes everywhere. If they don't like it they can stop requesting we come and complaining if we don't!
I go with my gut in situations where I need to know if someone will be hurt by my actions. The first time and every time I've heard of this my gut clenched. When my brother showed up at my mom's last year and announced they couldn't stay long, they were attending his girlfriend's father's meal, I stared in shock at my mom who looked like she was going to crumble. With all the work she put into that meal, all the time and effort spent on creating the perfect family day, she deserved better. It felt like they felt themselves to be so important that they were wanted everywhere and they deigned to give us a few hours of their precious time, for which we should be grateful. They didn't try to make us feel that way, but the fact that they'd planned to attend another meal after our family meal made us feel as if our meal wasn't good enough for them, wasn't filling enough, was just a stopover on the way to elsewhere. It hurt. Then we wondered if their other meal tasted better, if the decor was better, the dishes prettier, the menu more varied, the conversation better, etc. All that was brought up by my mom afterwords. She's 70, she deserved better than to have her one big meal a year trivialized that way. It truly felt like a slap in the face. Maybe we're just old fashioned Italians who's feelings are too easily hurt. But if anyone ever makes plans like that when I'm hosting, I think I'll be crushed.
"Maybe we're just old fashioned Italians who's feelings are too easily hurt."
Ya think?
When you're an adult, the world doesn't revolve around Mommy, ImKim. Sorry!!!
Feeling a little defensive? Your two posts on this matter are rude and offensive and this last one is more than a little off target. First, the world DOES revolve around "Mommy" and thank God for that. No matter how far I live from my own mother, I will always revere her as will my children and my grandsons and all future grandchildren we're blessed with. And it feels pretty good to know that I too, am revered, respected, and loved as a mother and grandmother. I wish the same for your mother, though I worry that she must learn to do without.
When she was alive, my mother and I had a relationship of mutual respect. She understood that, as an adult, I may have conflicting obligations.
In most cases, being the gracious woman she was, she would defer to the more needy mothers out there, as she pitied their insecurity. She didn't need to do Thanksgiving on a Thursday or Christmas on Christmas Day. She was an independent woman, who wasn't held hostage by the calendar. My father, of course, appreciated having a wife that was not manipulative of me or other people.
someones it has to be done, but its hard because your not eating as much as everyone else at either houses since you will be traveling to two or more. Aren't you suppose to eat and pass out?
"...When my brother showed up at my mom's last year and announced they couldn't stay long,..."
Are you saying that your brother didn't tell your close-knit family ahead of time? There's the rudeness. Even if he is in a new relationship and this was a very important issue unfamiliar to your family, he should have told your family and gotten those issues resolved beforehand. That way, all those little things like whether the decor, 'over there', was better, could have been hashed out and left a pleasant day. No matter how trivial a detail crossed your mind when your brother went to his other obligation, you didn't need to have that spoil what had been planned. I hope that all your guests in the future speak to you ahead of time, if they can only attend part of of your event.