COVID: Christmas Hosting
Two minutes before the start of your annual pre-Christmas party--now of course virtual, or more accurately “dual delivery,” because one guest is in your pod--you find yourself running up the stairs followed by four wild (domestic) dogs to make adjustments to your Zoom settings on the laptop in your bedroom. With twenty minutes to go before what will no doubt be a punctual arrival of your guests—no traffic—your husband has volunteered his elaborate Zoom setup and is busy plugging in his giant monitor, his speakers, and his embarrassingly shaped microphone. You are screaming, in part because no one can hear you over the Christmas music, and in part because you have so much else to do in the way of plating and garnishing cold appetizers, warming hot ones, getting out the green glasses, and finding the napkins you bought on sale a year ago that are just Christmassy enough. “Have you released me as host?” you yell—and then, even louder because your husband does not answer, “Am I the host or are you?”
At that moment the doorbell rings and your only three-dimensional guest has arrived. The dogs turn in a body, fling themselves downstairs, jump on her. Your voice rises in pitch, if not volume as you scream “Down!” You know they have heard you, because they are, after all, dogs and there is a thing in the world called “dog-pitch,” but they do not listen. It is as if they know Susan is the last guest they will be able to smell and they make the most of the opportunity. Once upstairs you take a few seconds to calm down in the dimly lit room: it occurs to you that the question, “Have you released me as host?” might open up some interesting possibilities. But, of course, it is a literal, even a technical, question. You make your husband host and head down the stairs, thinking as you plunge down to the kitchen that you should have chosen “co-host,” for reasons both practical and relational.
Once in the kitchen, you realize that the new position of the monitor and camera are not doing justice to what you think might still be called a “tablescape” even though it is your butcher-block counter. As a person with no spatial memory, it takes a while to produce a mirror image of the original setup in blues, greens, and lighted glass. You are helped by your son, who is good with space and patient with your domestic obsessions.
Out of—and into—nowhere, some virtual guests “arrive.” Ranged on the couch in their family room in which, in the days before COVID, you watched TV with them, they form a tableau reminiscent of a Christmas card. They are mouthing something you can’t hear; perhaps it is “Merry Christmas.” Your family, and your in-person guest yell back holiday wishes until it becomes clear something is wrong with the sound. You think about bellowing “Do you hear what I Hear?” but decide that even in this room of atheists, agnostics, Jews and mixtures of all of these it would be sacrilegious. After some unplugging and re-plugging of cables that you are irrationally afraid will get tangled in the tablescape, you and your husband agree. It is time to give up on his setup and downsize to your tiny laptop.
You run upstairs to get the laptop and come down yet again, this time wearing the uneasy mantle of the host. Because you are in a hurry to slip the crab cakes into the oven, you brush aside any musings on the ontological status of hosts and guests, waving away the ghost of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who, it seems, is eager to remind you of the parasitic relation between hosts and guests, and of the slippage between the (English) transitive verb “to host” and the host-as-identity. You wonder if Derrida ever made tiny tamales shaped like Christmas gifts, or heated homemade puff pastry appetizers in an under-the-counter oven when his regular oven imploded at Thanksgiving. You do not, at the moment, have time for Derrida, just as you do not have time to brush your hair.
On your laptop, your guests have shrunk, but they are still visible. And now they are audible as well. Your three-dimensional guest is opens red and white wine with your barely three-dimensional corkscrew which you have long meant to replace. Your older son has begun the long process of heating the appetizers in shifts. You have chicken liver mousse and scallops and wine. Some things are gluten free. Some are vegetarian. Some are, thankfully, both. You have made something new—pickled cherries for the mousse—and you are heating the classics—chicken bisteeya cigars and fig bites. The tiny tamales are in the steamer. It took you and your son two days to make them, although (or actually because) you learned a new trick to soften banana leaf wrappers individually over an open flame. Tonight, after the party, you will make a note of this technique on the index cards you use for academic research, for teaching, and for menu planning. Next year, if you do not lose the cards—and you will—you will know to allow more time for the tamales.
A host cannot control everything: not dogs who jump on guests, not ovens that give out, not cats who jump on tables. You think, overall, that you are getting better at letting go; your husband and sons, when asked directly, agree with this narrative, but not enthusiastically.
This year, though, you have a new challenge to both control and letting go. Although you will be serving your pod from your own kitchen, you have delivered packages of frozen, refrigerated, and unassembled appetizers to two other households them to thaw, heat, and assemble. As a manager, a control freak, an organized person, or G-d help you, an administrator, you have tried to mitigate chaos through the construction of the (to you) sacred list. In each package of appetizers-to-be you have included detailed instructions in thermal order--from room temperature for the chicken liver mousse and the cupcakes, to a torrid 400 degrees for the puff-pastry based hors d’oeuvres.
You cannot help, you tell yourself, being a little anxious. Will your guests really raise the heat once the crab cakes are taken out of the oven, or will they let the puff-pastry languish at a sub-optimal temperature? Surely, they will not try to heat the mousse. You also have a sneaking feeling about the garnishes, which you have packaged individually in planet-destroying plastic bags because this counts as an emergency. Will they remember that the cinnamon sugar goes on the basteeyas? The cucumber mayonnaise on the salmon on the blinis? Since you have become convinced during the last few weeks of experimentation that pickled cherries go with everything, you do not worry about anything except whether your guests will even try them.
Sometime between the crab cakes and the tamales, in the relative time of the less-than-real party, something happens. You do not have the words for this happening, which is something like “letting go” or as close to it as you, personally, have perhaps ever been able to achieve. You find, to coin a phrase, that you are releasing yourself as host. You cannot, at this distance, control how, what, or in what order people eat. Perhaps they have sprinkled cinnamon sugar on their blini or are making tiny stacks of crab cakes and pickled cherries. Perhaps they prefer to eat something from their fridge, or don’t feel like eating. One of the guests moves in and out of her candlelit dining room with a series of plates; perhaps she has memorized your instructions, or perhaps the shapes you see in the dim and cozy light are hamburgers, or takeout dumplings. It just doesn’t matter.
This attitude persists through our new form of present giving; for reasons only tangentially related to the pandemic and virtuality, your friend Kate suggested one of many popular forms of random gift exchange. You have had to force yourself, over the last few weeks, not to think in terms of particular recipients. The gifts, like the appetizers, travel, as they must, according to the desires of other people. As the game unfolds and everyone seems to be having a wonderful time, you let go of the family present baskets, the gift tags, the idea of the perfect gift moving in a direct line from giver to recipient. Just as you brushed aside Derrida’s ideas about hosting, you unlearn (and it happens fast) everything you know from anthropologists like Levi-Stauss or Marcel Mauss about the complex nature of the gift. You stop worrying that someone’s feelings will be hurt when “their” gift is traded. You happily accept some face cream that was not bought (particularly) with you in mind and watch your CBD oil get traded for an ab roller only to land where, it happens, you always thought it should. The game and the virtual format allow everyone to focus on one gift, one person, at a time. Friends perform; they are by turns dramatic, cynical, hilarious, and bemused. After the gift exchange everyone is tired. Virtual parties, like virtual lectures need to be short, their pleasures frontloaded. After everyone has left there are very few dishes to wash.
Around midnight, the house restored to order, you think about your own investments in being a host—and perhaps also of being a hostess. Remote hosting has revealed to you in good ways and bad that hosting is a form of theater that turns home into a stage for those that do not live in it. You think about the camera, the staging of food and decorations, the taking on and shrugging off the role of host. You decide finally you are all for that sense of theater, especially under the Christmas lights. You think about your need for control, and about how home and homing provide a space for that control and containment. You think about what it might mean to have friends over (here you imagine them in the flesh) and NOT to host. You know you are not ready to give up on planning, on the quiet acts of offering food and drink, especially those that you have made yourself. You think of how in your childhood, and in that of your husband, Christmas parties were “family” only, about how unlucky you are to have so little close family and how fortunate you are to have so many friends. Finally, you think about the rest of Christmas, the one that will take place within your household. Perhaps, you think, I don’t have to find the little battery powered lights to put under the glitter-covered bird in my mother’s silver bowl. It’s only the family, I think, with joy and sadness. No hosting required.