small confession: it really is a bit different to host for the holidays in a place that's yours. joe and i have already had every sort of holiday at our place; i remember a particularly improvisational san francisco party at which we floated sliced red onions in a vase. being married for the past few years didn't affect things much, either: when you've been with your partner since college, you don't exactly have to merge when-i-grow-ups, bank accounts, pet populations, and so on. we and our little hell's kitchen apartment were more or less the same. having our family over this time around, at a place we sweated, cried, and bled over for the better part of a year? i won't lie. there were frissons. good ones, happily: once we knew for sure that the dining table we ordered (thanks again, by the by, for weighing in on that) would arrive on time, we got excited about making things to plop atop it. christmas eve dinner with joe's parents went something like this:
i dug out spare candlesticks from the questionable cupcake stand project of '08, split a mixed bouquet into minisettings for our four thousand random vessels, and got out of the way; joe made wild arugula, poached egg, and some-sort-of-foofy-pork* salad, and artichoke and crab quiches for his mother's handmade crusts. had our sectional** arrived in time for christmas (alas), we'd certainly have formed a (drowsy, contented) human levee on it.
dinner on new year's day was a slightly more aerodynamic variation on that theme: we used our wedding dishes again, but we swapped the neighbors' stemmed wine glasses out for my beloved etched glass skull and thrifted don ho tumblers, i brought out a few more fabric roses, and we broke in the boss placemats my sister made and brought for christmas. joe made artichoke marinara over fresh pasta, which...i am not going to describe in detail, for there's a bit left in tupperware and i don't want to remind him that it's up for grabs.
speaking of sistercraft, in addition to jo's placemats, the marvelous gingerbread beings jo and em made in california for me, and the friendship bracelets i made for them when i had pneumonia,*** you guys:
wedding quilt! it's a galaga ship, handmade by my sister jo (with hand quilting backup from mom). "you didn't seem like the wedding ring types," said jo. to say that it was worth the wait would be a gross understatement.
a thrifty, bougie-tablescaping, crafty-like-ice-is-cold new year to you and yours, my people.
*i would be a terrible food writer. "and then there was a meat, i don't know, it smelled greasy."
**we address it apostrophically, to the confusion of those about us. GET HERE NOW, YOU COUCH!
***good excuse for errors, no? there were errors. i haven't made friendship bracelets in (cough).
2 comments:
And I especially like the photo on the ground, resting against the wall.
thank you! it's a wedding picture we've been auditioning for the wall; joe is lobbying hard, but i'm still a bit shy about putting it up.
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