Celebrations and Festivals

Story · all 20 words

The Year I Was the Host

For thirty-one years I was a guest. I arrived, I ate, I said the right things, and at some point in the evening I went home. Two years ago my mother announced that she was tired, and that the family occasion was moving to my flat.

I said yes in about a second, because you do, and then spent four weeks quietly frightened.

The invitation was the first thing I got wrong. I wrote seven o’clock, which in my family means nine, and my aunt arrived at ten past seven exactly, alone, to see what state the place was in. She has done this at every event in my life and I had simply never understood what she was doing until I was on the other side of it.

We had thirty-eight people and twenty-nine chairs. A tradition in this family that I had never noticed is that nobody sits down for the first hour anyway, so it did not matter at all. There is also a custom – unwritten, absolute – that the youngest person present opens the door to every new arrival, and my nephew took this so seriously that he ate standing beside it.

My sister came the day before to decorate. She brought lights, paper and far too many decorations for one flat, and the last of them stayed on the balcony until March, which I would like on the record as her fault.

The food defeated me. I had planned dinner; my mother arrived with three bags and turned it into a feast. She did this kindly and without a word of criticism, which was worse. There was so much of it that the guests were still finding dishes at eleven.

What surprised me was how little I saw of any of it. The host spends the entire evening in a doorway with something in each hand. I did not sit down for four hours. My own greeting to people became one word and a nod by about the fortieth arrival.

The good part came late. It is a religious festival, and the day itself is a public holiday, so nobody had to leave. At about midnight my cousin lit the candles on a cake for my grandmother, we all sang badly, and somebody two buildings away set off fireworks that had nothing to do with us and everything to do with the night.

People came to congratulate my brother, who had qualified as a doctor eleven days earlier, and he stood in the kitchen going slowly red. His present from my grandmother was a watch that had been her husband’s. She had wrapped it herself, in newspaper, badly, and he has not taken it off since.

I have never worked so hard at a party or enjoyed one less at the time. But at one in the morning, with everybody gone and my sister asleep on the sofa in the clothes she had dressed up in, I stood in a wrecked kitchen and understood something about the atmosphere in my mother’s house for thirty-one years: it was never accidental. Somebody was standing in a doorway making it.