Fun fact
Here’s a fun fact you learn only in your forties: The “holiday” season is a misnomer.
For grown-ups, it’s actually a lot of work. In particular, the return of holiday entertaining adds “hostess” to your resumé. You know the drill: After a sleepless night fretting over your pre-party checklist, followed by a mad dash all over town the next day to pick up such last-minute absurdities as fanciful guest soaps and frighteningly expensive Spanish almonds, and before fluffing the tree (and the pillows and the towels), syncing up the iPod, setting the festive table and lighting the scented votives — you suddenly look at your watch and realize that your guests are arriving in 10 minutes and your house may look terrific, but you haven’t given a moment’s thought to what you are going to wear.
Well, I certainly have been there and back, and each time I marvel at how much work we all go to as guests at someone else’s party, getting our hair and nails done, perhaps splurging on a swingy new party dress — and how little we put into it when hosting our own event.
Part of this can be chalked up to party-planning overload: My own mother, a stylish hostess who threw us a wedding bash to rival all gatherings since, cannot bear to this day to look at our wedding pictures because of her deep loathing for her mother-of-the-bride dress — uncharacteris-tically, a bright green chiffon number she ended up in simply because the question of what to wear never made it near her to-do list.
