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T A B L E++T A L K

Foreskin or against it? Discuss the good and bad aspects of circumcision in Table Talk.

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R E C E N T L Y

Reading between the whines
By Inda Schaenen
The sevenfold path to coping with seven-step parenting manuals
(12/01/97)

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Year after year I am thwarted from realizing my most grandiose holiday hostess fantasies. I never get to be the hostess. There's no parking on my extremely urban street, and even if there were, who am I kidding? I live in a two-bedroom apartment with two children, two adults and 4,000 books, and there's no room for anybody else. I also have what is euphemistically referred to as a "blended" family -- at the high water mark my son had 11 grandparents -- and I'm low on the totem pole when it comes to dictating Christmas festivities, over which several senior members of the clan are, understandably, territorially protective. My typical contribution to holiday hoopla is that I get to bring an agreed-upon embellishment to someone else's already strategically orchestrated ritual.

But I can dream, can't I? Every year around daylight-saving weekend I start conjuring up my plan for a children's cookie decorating party, which I imagine would commence on a cold Saturday afternoon in mid-December, when all the friends and cousins would come over in their pressed corduroy pants and plaid dresses and slather frosting on my grandmother's-recipe sugar cookies, and the grown-ups would listen to Irish carols in the living room while eating lasagna and getting quietly smashed on eggnog, the Christmas lights on the tree atwinkle all the while.

I have another holiday hostess dream: to throw the kind of loud, sloppy cocktail party you remember from movies like "The Apartment" or "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "Auntie Mame" or "All About Eve" -- you know, the lampshade-on-the-head, secretaries-doing-the-Watusi type of party. In my version, "James Brown's Funky Christmas" album is blaring from the stereo and drunken couples are frugging in the hallway, the rugs are rolled up and stuffed into closets and decimated platters of finger foods, collapsed like defeated soldiers, line the buffet and the kitchen countertops. Somebody genially dumps the contents of a rum-filled flask into the already potent punch bowl of eggnog and I, in a sleeveless velvet dress and stocking feet, am inching my way through the lurching, leering crowd picking up dirty napkins and abandoned plastic cups when I find myself momentarily pinned between the refrigerator and the water heater by some ignoble friend of my husband's, who won't remember the next day what he did.

Maybe the fantasy I like best is the Christmas Eve one, during which the whole extended family comes to our house (which is, as I said, an apartment) around sunset for a supper of crusty bread and mussels stewed in garlic and white wine (which nobody likes but me). The rooms would be glowing by candlelight and there would be garlands of pine boughs and holly festooning the bookshelves, and after dinner we'd sip eggnog by the crackling fire (which in our apartment is bricked up) and listen to Bing while watching the kiddies pick gingerbread ornaments off the tree and squash their faces against the steamy windows, scanning the darkening skies for the fat man (who is known to be a fraud by every child in the family except my own).

But alas. I spend every December distractedly working and feverishly shopping and wrapping and wistfully attending the parties of people with parking on their streets, and the crowd of glowing affectionate faces I imagine milling around happily at my own house is limited to the little one I see there every day -- a dear, beloved, appreciative crowd, but only one of its members can drink my boozy eggnog, which has become the liquid totem of my dashed hostess dreams.

N E X T+P A G E: But the kids can't drink it!