This Is Certainly Not Obligatory
Dear Miss Manners: I’m in my late ‘20s, newly married, and as time allows, my husband and I enjoy having dinner guests. I am simply looking for their company and have no intention of asking them to bring part of the meal.
Our gatherings are rarely formal but it is still my instinct to think that if I am inviting someone to my house, it is impolite to assume that the guest should have to help with the meal. Sometimes the wife offers to bring something. I usually graciously decline.
When other couples invite us, my husband will ask what I offered to bring. My answer is usually nothing. I don’t recall having heard my mom offer to bring food when invited to dinner.
Is this a custom I have been unaware of? Is it fair to believe that if we are invited to someone’s home we shouldn’t feel obligated to bring a side dish or something?
Gentle Reader: It is increasingly customary for people to treat all meals as cooperative ventures, but that doesn’t mean Miss Manners likes it any more than you do.
When hosts do it - “Please come to dinner - and by the way, we’d like you to bring a main course to serve 15” - it is clearly rude. When guests offer to bring something, it is kind; but it is still rude for the hosts to be too quick to take them up on it or to do it with such frequency that they might as well announce that they expect it.
Yes, friends should share the cooking - but unless a group of people has agreed to a truly cooperative meal, in which the person who offers the house is not the host but the organizer who gains other people’s consent, the proper way is by issuing reciprocal invitations.
As you do your full share of entertaining, Miss Manners absolves you of the task of cooking for other people’s dinner parties.
Dear Miss Manners: When my elderly aunt finishes eating, she pours water from her glass over her fingers onto her plate, then wipes her fingers on her napkin.
I entertain Auntie frequently, in my home and in restaurants, and I find this offensive. The first time, I surreptitiously stifled my children’s snickers and just made sure I didn’t spill the liquid from her plate when I cleared the table. When she did it in a restaurant, I asked why. She said it was because no one provides finger bowls any more. Now, I just grit my teeth and say nothing.
When you’re 85, perhaps you’re entitled to make up your own rules of etiquette. Or perhaps I’m the one whose knowledge of manners is lacking.
Soon Auntie will move into a lovely retirement complex, where she will take her evening meal in the community dining room. I fear she will be embarrassed if one of her new companions takes her to task.
Gentle Reader: In spite of the fact that you are right that the water goblet should not be used for hand-washing, Miss Manners confesses to a sneaking sympathy with Auntie.
Whatever did happen to the relationship between finger bowls and the necessity of cleaning the fingers? The only place you ever see finger bowls any more is at formal dinners, where silverware abounds and the food is exquisitely proportioned for easy eating.
People at barbecues and fast-food restaurants, who have to rip apart their food with their bare hands, never see a finger bowl; they are expected to make do with ridiculous pieces of paper trying to pass themselves off as napkins.
Ah, well. People of 85 do not get to make up their own manners, but they do get to be indulged, if they are so lucky as to have a fond relative to help. Couldn’t you give your aunt a finger bowl when she eats at your house? It would give your children something to look at while they are stifling their snickers.
Or you could give her a warm towel after dinner, or a wet wipe at a restaurant and request the retirement home to oblige her by producing one or the other for her.
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Judith Martin United Features Syndicate