How To Revive The Neighborhood*
Step 1: Get to know your neighbors
Where’s My Village? It is a common complaint. There’s a Scary Mommy version, a cursing Aussie version, a Hello Mamas version — that whole network looks like it was created to address missing villages, and it isn’t the only one. The missing village is why mommy blogging became a thing. Gen X moms who opted out of career to raise families returned home to find they were often one of few in their neighborhood at home. Blogs became a virtual network. You will find loads more of “where’s my village” posts if you query the phrase. Moms still have trouble meeting other moms. And then there are the dads who start as odd-men-out.
The reasons for this are many and varied, and I will update explanations on what happened to the village soon. (Yes, I do know what happened. I’ve been studying it for over a decade and I lived it before that.) It is important to know why and how stuff happened or we just set our daughters up for the same mistakes. Today, however, is about solutions, or the beginnings of solutions.
The primary practical impediment to villages: we don’t know our neighbors. We don’t know our neighbors because most of the rhythms and ways we used to meet no longer exist. One of those ways, however, is relatively easy to add back into our lives: the house party. Sit around a table — a kitchen table, a dining table, a coffee table, it does not matter and share refreshment. Talk to each other.
The New York Times has gone so far as to declare the house party dead. Yes, the house party has fallen out of favor. First, we have the perfection pressure. This is not entirely new, but the perfect presentations on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest made that pressure worse. Browse the perfectly cropped vignettes and then — who wants to throw a crappy house party?
Many moderns also tell ourselves that we don’t need contact with local people in real life because it is so easy to keep up with established friends and family no matter how far. They are easily reachable in the device all but attached to the palm of our hands. Such connection suffices when we are young, unencumbered, and if we are well-employed enough to travel to family and friends when it counts. But as life goes on we do need community — a truth the young often discover as need or loneliness hits them.
Mother Nature is particularly harsh when she dishes out this lesson. As the floods in and around Houston reminded us last summer, sometimes 4 miles might as well be 400. I recall similar lessons when Iceland’s volcano erupted in 2010, halting air travel in northern Europe and between the US and Europe. Commutes that international expats factored into their weekly or monthly routine were suddenly not available and reminded us that we were actually quite far from our loved ones.
Thus, convinced that we don’t need to know our neighbors and that parties are a pain, we declare, “Why bother?” Alas, both are mistakes. Knowing neighbors enriches our lives and parties don’t have to be a pain.
To revive the simple house party
Think small. Invite two or three other people or couples over.
Have an open house. Open your doors for a designated time. It is flexible. It works for all party sizes, for guests’ schedules, and a wide variety of serving choices. You can do anything from basic cocktails to a full buffet.
Keep invites simple. There are all sorts of rules of how many weeks before and such. Forget them. Frankly, all the invite etiquette is in flux anyway. (Few etiquette mavens will admit this, but it is true.) The important part is to have neighbors over. If an email gets it done, great. If you need to put a note in a mail box while you are on your walk, do that.
Do not fuss over food. How counter-intuitive this must sound in this age of non-fat, no foam, vegan, gluten-free, cold brew latte. It can be done. A few guidelines:
- Skip food and have a drinks party. Morning or afternoon coffees with pastries or biscotti, afternoon tea with finger sandwiches, or cocktails with bar snacks, and maybe something as complicated as a cheese board. This makes diet accommodation easier, and no one is expecting to walk out with a full tummy.
- Prepare what you know how to prepare. Unless you are a professional chef, experimenting with food for a party is fraught with peril. And if you are a professional chef, you probably know that.
- Serve one pot dishes. Baked dishes, stews, and chilis are typically prep intensive but require little more than an oven when party time arrives. Added bonus: they make a house smell delightful as guests arrive. It is also easy to make and serve veggie chili alongside regular chili.
- Front load food prep. This is a standard bit of party planning advice because it is excellent advice. You will avoid the unpleasant discovery that this easy 15 minute prep time and that simple 8 minute prep time are neither easy nor simple when they have to be done in tandem (precise kitchen scheduling is an advanced homemaking skill learned though trial and error).
- Two words: pot luck. A few years ago, a video about a spontaneous pot luck in an apartment building hallway bounced around Facebook. Do that. Or try modified bring-your-own whatevers. My brother and sister-in-law host Bring Your Own Grill gatherings. They supply the salad, drinks, and a hot grill. Guests come with their protein of choice. We entertain so often that my regular guests no longer ask what to bring for our large parties. I clear out the dining room buffet and put out assorted platters, which our guests fill with desserts as they arrive.
Tidy up and if the urge strikes, decorate simply. Tidy the party spaces and put on welcoming lighting at the entrance. Use dimmed lighting in the entertaining rooms, which not only sets a mood but also hides many house imperfections. You could stop there. Or for a little-bit-special mood, use flowers and candles and/or fairy lights. One of my aunts used to insist that you only clean, as opposed to tidy, bathrooms before a party. Clean everything else after the party. Granted she was older so her relative standards were different. She basically meant sweeping and vacuuming, and for those she does have a point; no one is likely to notice your floors during the party and they will have to be done after the party. All the extra fillips from Pinterest are pretty, but they aren’t necessary, and if they are keeping you from hosting, then forget them.
Occasionally invite children. Adults need adult time, but as I offer these party tips to get to know neighbors for a little village restoration, I encourage occasionally including children. For more village goodness: leverage babysitting. Ask older children if they would be willing to do a little tot minding. Please note, this is not some onerous or horrifying task. The parents of babysitters and babysittees will be in the house, within shouting distance likely. Having a few older kids on duty gives them something fun to do and can give a parent of an active toddler a moment for a bite and a moment of adult conversation. If the party is mostly older kids, have a few vintage distractions available, if only to keep keep them off their phones. Glow sticks, Mad Libs, temporary tattoos, and if you have a yard, a soccer ball and some hula hoops. I promise it works if two or three of them start doing it. I’ve seen it.
Think defensively about cleanup. Cleanup is a pain and can discourage hosting in the first place. Have kids put away toys-of-many-parts before other kids arrive. The one pot meal advice above is partially about cleanup. Serving finger foods works, too. They are fun, kids love them, and they only require serving trays and utensils, napkins. Do a couple of bussing rounds during the party. Guests will likely help. Accept it. Kitchen sinks offer almost as much getting-to-know-you potential as kitchen tables.
In the old days, the thank you for hosting a party was a return invitation. That doesn’t happen much anymore because people don’t have house parities much anymore. Hostess gifts have become the thing. Just one more way consumerism has crept in to our life to replace something good.
So have a house party. Inspire a revival.
*When this piece ran yesterday, its title was “How to Revive a Village.” Up to this point I had been using the It Takes a Village idiom in all of my pieces on community restoration. The village analogy was the one that most everyone got. But two things happened on March 22 to make me change my mind.
A cluster of Facebook articles about deleting the platform hit my inbox and social media feeds. #DeleteFacebook is the theme of the day, but there are some comments about how it is hard. For example, this Bizwomen article quotes Chris O’Brien at VentureBeat: “Practically and emotionally, leaving Facebook feels like you’re leaving the internet. Worse, it feels like you’re leaving the world, unplugging from friends, news, and the daily stimulus that drives your day.” Well, that happens to be one of the reasons I wrote this article. I have the impression that for many 30somethings, leaving the internet would feel like leaving their daily community. For them, community is virtual.
The other thing? The trailer for the documentary on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? landed. “I suppose it is an invitation,” he says. I suppose it is. And from here on out, I’ll be using Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood as my main idiom.
It says select theaters June 8. I don’t care how select the theaters are, or how far. For my childhood memories — this theme song and his voice send me right back to a living room with flame orange shag carpet — and for my adult hopes, I’m there.
Related and update: a discussion and map of social capital in the US from Michael Hendrix. Yellow is good, blue is bad — and turns assumptions about the South upside down. (And Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is an excellent documentary.)
