Party On, Dudes!

We held our annual Holiday Open House this past weekend, which as usual was a fete chock full of good cheer, great friends, yummy food, and widespread merriment. As I was preparing for the party, it occurred to me that I have been throwing this bash since before Husband and I even began dating. It has been relocated through 3 cities, 2 apartments and our current house. When it started, in 1991, I was a young, single professional woman living on her own in a fairly-cruddy-but-affordable apartment. My pals and I all had jobs, but no one was married yet, or (heaven forbid) had children. Get-togethers were likely to involve free-flowing libations, loud music, and late hours. [The most notorious collective-memory of these early years was captured in photographic evidence from 1995. The pictures implicate a large number of my closest friends in what would come to be known as the scandalous "Cookie-Decorating Incident." (Let me just sum it up thusly:
tubs of frosting + food coloring + sugar cookies + BEER = T-r-o-u-b-l-e.)

Gazing around at our living room on Saturday, I thought, "Oh, how times have changed!"  First of all, it was afternoon. No longer do we party into the wee hours...and there will be no Last Call....unless it's a warning that someone is about to abscond with the one remaining pumpkin muffin. I try playing festive music, but end up turning it off when I can't hear the tunes over the mayhem. And speaking of chaos, we seem to have acquired an awful lot of extra people over the last decade or so--namely husbands and children. This is probably an illusion, but it almost seems like the offspring outnumber us these days...or maybe that's just due to the amount of manic energy and earsplitting noise they put out. However, I must report that the Next Generation experienced their own little Icing Incident this year...it involved some storebought cookies, whose sugary coating stained one's teeth a vivid, ogre-ish green. The youngsters delighted in consuming as many as they could, then grossing out whatever adult happened to be nearby. Ah, good times.

Some things of course remain the same--people still congregate in the kitchen for conversation and edibles. The drinks still flow...although these days it's bound to consist of equal amounts of Sam Adams, Pepsi, and juice boxes. There are still wild moments, as when I went to the basement to retrieve a beverage and inadvertently entered the Lethal Nerf Combat Zone ("Duck and cover, Mom!" is not something I'm quite used to hearing at a party...and by the way, whose brilliant idea was it to ARM the children in the first place?) There was the requisite Party Injury--not attributable to over-consumption--as my sister unfortunately stubbed her toe...running away from the hyped-up children chasing her. And finally, there was just a modicum of inappropriate behavior, as Riley (yes, MY son, naturally) got out his brand-new Merriam-Webster Children's Dictionary (aww, look at my little nerdling, showing his friends how to look up words!) and then giggled hysterically as he confessed through his toothless grin, "We found the A-word!" (Hey, why don't you look up "grounded until you're 30!" You might have more use for that one...)

The day after the fiesta, I was feeling the effects of too much sugar and caffeine, but I'll gladly take those consequences over Mornings After in the old days. So all-in-all, I'd have to say that another December has been kicked off in fine fashion. Let this be the beginning of a treat-eating, friend-visiting, partygoing month...just as soon as I have my coffee, that is!