3 Party Ideas
To practice the art of celebrating our homes, here are three ideas for hosting a party! Feel free to take on any of them, change them up however you like, and make adjustments as you see fit. The point is to take the time to enjoy your home by welcoming others inside.
Just remember, the best party is one where the host is relaxed. Nothing makes people feel more ill at ease than walking in and experiencing the host all frazzled and acting like s/he’s working SO hard to make people happy.
So do all of your prep ahead of time. And whatever doesn’t get done, doesn’t matter! You should enjoy your party as much as your guests.
GAME NIGHT
The idea behind this celebration is self explanatory and great for people who already love games, or for groups who don't always have a lot to talk about and could use a little structure for an evening together.
The Set Up
If you want to, you can specify whether this will be an all-card-games kind of night (such as Poker Spades), or for the more adventurous, you can make it a little sillier and choose things like Taboo, Charades, Trivia, etc. Or, do a little of everything! The only recommendation here is to choose ahead of time what will be played so that you don't get caught up in a back and forth over who wants to play what. As long as you play 2-3 different games, everyone should be happy.
Next, you'll decide on food. Will it be all appetizer type foods, or will you do a full dinner? And then decide if you're going to ask everyone to bring something or if you'll provide it all. Also consider whether or not you'll do the entire party in one room or split between the living area and the dining table. For my most recent game night, we had appetizers in the living room where we also played things like Taboo and trivia. But when we wanted to play cards, we moved to the dining table. Because we also had a full dinner, we had to clear the dining table after dinner so that we could play cards. It's up to you how much back and forth between rooms you want to do and whether or not a full dinner makes sense.
Make It Special
A signature cocktail is terrific for this kind of party. First of all, you don't have to worry about stocking a full bar. And second of all, it's festive! If you (or someone in your group) loves making cocktails, decide what it'll be and either set up a bar with all of the fixings or mix it up ahead of time using a big bowl (up to you if you want to find a vintage punch bowl).
Consider making or buying specialty drink tags for everyone. For our party, I simply took small playing cards, punched a hole in the corners, and tied around the stems with yarn. I happened to have a set of extra small cards from when my kids were young. I kept them in my purse for when we were at restaurants and we needed to keep them entertained. Turns out the small sized cards were perfect for drink tags. You might be able to find them at party stores, sold as an item for goodie bags. But if not, just use regular sized cards.
Another way to make it special is to consider having prizes. These don't have to be elaborate or expensive! I simply bought trial sized things at our local World Market: tiny jars of jam, lemon curd, honey, old fashioned stick candy, small packages of cookies, etc. The point wasn't so much what the prizes were... it was just fun for people to reach in and blindly pull something out of a basket.
If you want to play up the game night theme further, you could use playing cards as coasters, use Scrabble tiles to spell things out at the bar, fill up clear glass vases with poker chips or dice (and water) and use them for flowers. Because this isn't a kids' party, I don't think you need to go overboard with the theme. Just consider a few little nods to games that will make your friends laugh.
"CHOPPED" (COOKING COMPETITION)
If you have a few friends who love to cook, this party is so much fun. If you're not familiar with the reality TV show, "Chopped," basically what happens is that each cook is given a basket of food... often the items seem unrelated at first... and then they have 30 minutes to come up with a recipe that will use every ingredient. This party is a spin-off.
The Set Up
You'll either write each item on a piece of paper and have people pull from a hat, or you can buy "food dice" and roll. There are so many variations you can make to the rules, and obviously choose whatever you think would be most fun for your group. Either way, everyone draws (or rolls) one item from each category to come up with their list of ingredients they'll need to work with. And an important note, you don't have to ONLY use the ingredients you are assigned. You can add others, as long as you also use ALL of the ingredients you've been given to work with.
For types of food, you could have a vegetable, fruit, meat, spice/herb and starch/carb category. Then you can decide if you also want to include a cuisine category, where people would have to somehow put a particular cultural spin on whatever their recipe is. Or, as I've often done, the ingredients themselves usually point toward a particular cuisine that we then embellish with other staples from that food culture. Another consideration is whether or not you include a dish type as a category. Examples would be appetizer, main dish, side, 1st course, 2nd course, dessert, etc.
So for example, someone might choose out of a hat the following ingredient
Vegetable: beets
Fruit: grapefruit
Meat: shrimp
Spice/Herb: basil
Starch/Carb: corn
Dish: appetizer
And a possible recipe might be some kind of finger food (because it's an appetizer) where you've got a spoonfull of chopped roasted beets, raw shrimp, and red onion, where the shrimp is marinated in grapefruit juice (which kills the bacteria in a Spanish ceviche style of cooking) and placed on top of a corn chip, sprinkled with basil.
The final rule you'll need to decide on is whether or not people can use/look up recipes based on their ingredients list, or if they have to make something up on their own. When I do this kind of party, I don't stipulate on this one way or another. Cooks can do whatever they like to make something they think will be yummy! But creativity is definitely encouraged (and needed) because you might end up with a rather odd mix of ingredients.
Make It Special
Much of the work for this party is done by the cooks, in their own homes. So after you've figured out your recipe, you really just need to focus on the table setting to make it special.
To keep with the cooking focus of the party, use herbs instead of (or in addition to) flowers for the table. Things like basil, rosemary, cilantro… anything! Instead of one big floral centerpiece, just put a few stems into a few small containers and put one in front of each guest or just use 3-5 of them down the center of the table. You could also just place a stem of an herb across each plate. Below, you’ll see I’ve written the name of the guest on mussel shell and there’s a sprig of cilantro underneath.
Definitely use your favorite dishes, serving ware and glasses. And definitely cloth napkins! But also consider:
making beautiful place cards
offering blank recipe cards so the cooks can write out their recipes for everyone to take home
buy some cardboard take out containers. They sell nice looking ones at The Container Store, Amazon and on Etsy. Or, you could suggest that everyone bring their own empty storage containers, or even splurge and buy re-useable take out containers for everyone. In my experience, there haven't been a lot of leftovers, so maybe this last suggestion is unnecessary.
BOOK SWAP
This one is the most flexible in terms of number of people. If you aren't up for hosting a larger party, you can keep this one to just you and another friend if you like. Or, of course, expand it. Obviously, it's a celebration for book lovers, so that's pretty much the only requirement for your guest list.
The Set Up
It's pretty simple. You will probably want to decide on the number of recommendations each person will bring. Presumably, they'll be recommending their favorite books of all time! You may also want to suggest people bring one recommendation for each of a certain genre. Obviously, this really depends on the specific people who you're inviting. But maybe you know everyone reads mysteries and standard fiction but you're curious if everyone also has a favorite classic novel and/or a favorite non-fiction book as well. I think when you have some requirements, it stretches people to think a little deeper about what they've read and trigger some really interesting suggestions.
The next thing to decide on is whether or not everyone will bring at least one of their book recommendations to swap with another person. Or, if these will just be recommendations that people can then decide to find on their own, afterwards. Some people love sharing books while others are really fond of their personal libraries and don't want to risk not getting a book back.
Make It Special
A high tea setting is wonderful for this kind of gathering. If you have special china tea cups and tea pots, now's the time to bring them out! Using specialty serving ware like creamers, sugar bowls, dessert plates, coffee spoons and linen napkins really elevates the experience and, I think, sets the scene for some good conversation because you know you'll be there awhile! To make it a "high" tea, you'd also be offering finger foods, both sweet and savory, which sometimes means additional specialty items like bowls for clotted cream and lemon curd, which adds to the feeling that this isn't an ordinary slurp of tea. If you don't already own these things, I highly recommend going to thrift stores to find them very inexpensively. Personally, my collection is all mix & match... I don't have a full set of anything. But you can find full sets and one-offs at thrift stores.
If you're hosting this in the evening instead of in the afternoon, you can always offer aperitifs, gin, brandy, etc etc... who says the tea cups have to be holding tea? And to take it as step further, there's a whole sub culture out there of tea cocktail afficionados. Just Google "tea cocktails" and you'll get some recipes!
In addition to the high tea setting (which is really special on its own), you could consider making or buying book plates to give as gifts. These are the ones I use and I love them! They’re made by Felix Doolittle, a wonderful watercolor artist.
Finally, I think it’s really sweet to use vintage tea cups, sugar bowls and creamers for little plants, so if you’re doing a tea themed book party, this would be a nice touch. Since it’s spring, I decided to go with bulbs. Now you can certainly plant bulbs yourself and force them to bloom, but you’d have to be pretty good at guessing when they’d actually blossom and time it with your party. (And that sounds complicated, right)? So I cheated! I bought some bulbs that were already flowering from the grocery store and simply re-potted them in my tea ware. Easy Peasy!
