A week and a half ago, I hosted my first New Year’s Eve party. It was also the first party I’d hosted since June, after several months of household catastrophe and chaos. My first New Year’s resolution? Less catastrophic thinking, more parties.
Of course, I was overly ambitious and made everything the day of, didn’t go grocery shopping until that morning. I made saucy stovetop meatballs, cream cheese and pepper jelly with crackers, a salmon dip whose recipe I stole from my cousin’s mother-in-law at our Lutz family Christmas Eve gathering, spinach and artichoke dip, mushrooms stuffed with fontina cheese and bacon and spinach. My mother made divinity that she sent the day before with my father. The crowning achievement, of course, was the make-your-own French 75 bar. My mother also loaned me a glass pitcher and a Lucite tub and I found a set of six champagne flutes at Bloomingdeal’s for eighteen dollars. I made freezer door dirty martinis, which, when my friend sipped and asked me, “Here, taste this. Doesn’t that seem really dirty to you?”, I responded, “Actually, that doesn’t seem dirty enough.” Still perfecting that I suppose.
I was in the kitchen panicking until 8:30, when guests were supposed to begin arriving. My friend Molly showed up early to help me finish everything (there was a dried fruit garland that never materialized, but ah well), and by the time my brother and his friends showed up, I was scrambling in the bathroom to get ready, but thankfully the food was finished. My friend Autumn showed up with New Years party attire and hung gold tinsel around my neck. I was dressed and prepared to host by the time guests started arriving in waves. But it only took ten minutes for me to abandon my heels and spend the whole party barefoot. Hey, it’s my damn house after all.
It was a small party - three of my Jackson friends, one of their boyfriends, my brother and two of his friends, my two best friends from high school and each of their respective partners, two friends from college who now live in New York. Most of these people had never met each other outside of their respective groups, which always makes me nervous. A massive house party where groups of people don’t know each other is one thing. A party of thirteen where the guests' only common thread is you, the host, is another entirely. I spent most of the night worrying I had left someone alone too long, that I had talked to someone too long and forgotten about someone else, that I wasn’t giving everyone equal attention, that I had never done introductions. One of my New York friends, she commented on this later over a beer at Fenian’s. I said that I think I worry a lot about other people. “I can see that,” she said. “You spent the whole of the party checking on everyone, making sure we were having a good time.”
In the middle of the party, an old friend who lives across the country showed up unexpectedly, and I was just drunk enough to throw my arms around his neck, nearly start crying and say, “You’re here! I can’t believe you’re here!”
In the end, I think it went well. We drank, we smoked on the porch, Barry charmed the whole party like he always does. The disposable camera I bought was spent (I’m getting the photos back this week, which could be all indecipherable blurs). We toasted with champagne at midnight in the mixed company of vintage glassware and plastic champagne coupes my friend Kat had brought. We played Auld Lang Syne. I woke up with a hangover that could have knocked an Olympian on their ass and I spent the first day of the New Year on the couch, moaning and drifting in and out of sleep. I started The Americans.
Maybe I should’ve drank a little less. Maybe it took me much longer than it should’ve to clean up party aftermath left throughout the house. This past year, I spent a lot of time trying to keep my house, myself, clean and orderly, free of mess, after years of internalizing and being told that I am far too messy. I was told this by parents, lovers, friends. And they were right, to an extent. You can’t blaze through life all the time, unconcerned with the consequences. You can’t drink to excess, wake up every morning with a hangover.
But sometimes you can.
I think this is the year to remember that. To remember that I can take care of myself, but not feel like a failure when I let myself go. Sometimes the mess sits unattended for a day or two, after a night of raucous joy. Sometimes you lean a little too far into excess, and spend the next day paying for it. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it, and it doesn’t mean it wasn’t beautiful.
I have good feelings about this year. I hope you do too.