An invitation
It’s the winter solstice and the sky seemed to waver here at 3:55, just for a moment. Tomorrow will be three merciful seconds lighter than today. There’s a Celtic tradition of opening all your doors on this day, letting the old year out and the lighter half of the year in. Opening my doors had me thinking about hospitality, the way it appears and disappears, flickers candle-like. There’s a long tradition of being hospitable this time of year, lighting candles and fires, providing warmth, inviting in conversation.
Readers and writers invite one another in: the writer to her words and ideas, the reader to his mind and responses. So I thought we could try something together, you and I, an imagined dinner party.
To play: imagine you have entered a space, large but not cavernous. A table is laid. While each place setting is distinct from its neighbor’s, you choose the level of formality—slapdash knife and fork on the same side with paper napkin; dessert forks with cloth napkins; crystal and china or melamine. You are host and guest, as a reader ought to be with a text. At any time you may change the level of formality, this is your imagination, your choice. My imagining, if it’s useful, is a bit of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, but in a home setting rather than The Brooklyn Museum, a long rectangle rather than a triangle.
There are corners that can be filled if unexpected guests arrive. More cushions, too, should you wish to sit on the floor. There are no name cards, instead, a topic at each setting. The topics are in bold below, each short paragraph a place setting. You may imagine these topics as people but you don’t need to. For the sake of imagining, I’ve personified them. The dinner party shifts over time, as parties do: people get up, formality softens, and one topic will scoot over to chat to some topic two chairs down when the chair between is temporarily vacated; as combined topics, they create a new dialogue, new frictions and understandings. Please consider whose elbow is next to whose elbow. Who might catch whose eyes across the table.
What I would like to do is cut each of these up and put them in an envelope to mail to you so you might arrange them on your table. But imagination will have to suffice. And when you have a moment, let me know where you’d like to sit. So you and I, reader and writer, will play both host and guest together.
Topic: word usage. On average, “hospitality” occurs five times per one million words, but in 2021, after collective loneliness decided sourdough starters had run their course of comfort and it was people we all wanted, the word spiked, five times its usual usage. “Hospitality” occurred 24 times per one million words.
Topic: three hostesses. 1. Rebecca’s aunt-in-law comes for days, sometimes stays for weeks. She’s mainly horizontal, eats a block of sharp cheddar each day. Cheese crumbs all over her chest. The children delight in her stories even as she takes up the family couch. Every time, Rebecca thinks of saying no, says yes. 2. Phoebe’s friend comes, always, at a lurch: a last-minute “I’ll be in London can I stay” no punctuation kind of request. Her friend is interesting and insecure in the way that calls your own values into question, theirs into celebration. There is a lot of unloading. Like an emotional hijacking on Wednesday you didn’t see coming on Monday. Every time, Phoebe makes up their bed. After they’ve departed, she straightens up, her guestroom and her spirit. 3. My mother’s friend, a Russian refusnik she helped escape the Soviet Union, in and out of our house my whole childhood. When I’m practicing piano, there he is in the middle of the living room, meditating with his shirt off; when we’re playing hide and seek, there are his paints and his dropcloths and his canvases and an entire room off limits. “Why does he need to be here though?” “Because we are here, Alissa, and we are happy to have him here with us.”
Topic: population. Over the next century, the projections of population collapse in Europe with and without migration look like two roads diverged in a wood, or a less-than symbol. Population growth (births minus deaths) is projected to turn negative by the 2030s; and without net migration, the UK population will decline from 2029. The strains of collapse: shrinking workforces, increased dependency ratios, and challenges to pension systems. My children will be able to buy the homes I can’t afford and then never retire.
Topic: environmental migration. Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who are obliged to leave their homes for changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions. Estimates range—the number of environmental migrants by 2050 will be anywhere between 25 million and one billion.
Topic: Mary and Jesus. “And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.” (Luke 2:7)
Topic: kitchen words. In a student’s kitchen, on the whiteboard, a parent has written: If you have more than enough, build a longer table not a higher wall.
Topic: foot and soul. Shiran bends down, “right here,” she says, tapping her foot, “where your body invites your soul in.” All the parks in London were closed yesterday for the wind, and even today on the Heath, the plane trees look whipped up, small limbs scattered at their feet. We navigate them in our discussion. English is not her first language and her syntax is mystical, even when she’s arranging playdates, but more so when she’s telling stories of her job as a palliative care doctor. “The body is a temporary house, one not our own.”
Topic: the Heath. Hampstead Heath is an ancient heath; hunter-gatherer tools from 7000 BC have been unearthed here; the first written record is as a gift from Ethelred the Unready in 986; and then it pops up in the Domesday book of 1086. Between his father’s airtight will and protesting residents and farmers, Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson’s dreams to develop and sell off Hampstead Heath were repeatedly rejected. By the time of his death, there was such demand for public ownership of the heath that on behalf of the public, the Metropolitan Board of Works bought the heath for £45,000 and gifted it to all of London, residents and visitors.
Topic: parent discourse. “We’re teaching our children that their toys are theirs. As adults you wouldn’t pick up someone’s cellphone just because you needed it, would you?” “Why not?”
Topic: needing to go. Walking through Kensington, an eight-year-old asks, “if I knocked on this door and asked to go to the bathroom, would they let me in?”
Topic: gaps. In Feudal Europe, the top 2% held 14-16% of the wealth. In 2025 America, the top 1% holds around 30-31% of the national wealth, while the bottom 50% owns about 2.5%.
Topic: strategies. “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous [...] We want a world in which migration is not merely ‘orderly’ but one in which sovereign countries work together to stop rather than facilitate destabilizing population flows, and have full control over whom they do and do not admit.” (National Security Strategy of the United States of America, November 2025)
Topic: The Son of Man, a servant, and a king. “For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited me in.” (Matthew 25:35)
Topic: the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” (Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”)
Topic: private property. Mark and Patricia McCloskey wielding a Colt AR-15 and a Bryco pistol, shouted, “Get out!”
Topic: roaming. “You have a legally protected right to use public rights of way, which are routes that cross mostly private land but are open to the public at all times.” (United Kingdom’s Right to Roam)
Topic: a teenage granddaughter about her grandmother’s rules.
Hold people by the wrist and walk them to other people you want them to meet.
There is always one more seat at the table; we should be elbow to elbow.
Never wear shoes so no one needs to feel formal, especially in formal spaces.
Touch babies: talk to them, hold them.
Bad table manners do not preclude you from joining.
Consider everyone at the table family.
Play games.
Sing “My land is Your Land” on Thanksgiving.
When Elton John comes for dinner, say, “Elton, roll up your trouser leg and show Bernie your knee surgery.”
A dinner party should be eclectic.
Invite strangers on the street up for a snack
Be fearless: everyone is people, strangers and celebrities and past presidents.
Topic: your body. 43% of our cells are human cells. The remaining 67% are microscopic colonists. Each of us is more host than self.