Meg Mason’s take on Christmas etiquette
Our Agony Aunt Meg Mason dishes out somewhat questionable style and decorating advice for the silly season
We’re about to complete a year-long renovation and will be moving in the week before Christmas. My family is suggesting we host lunch to celebrate the new house, but I just can’t bear the thought of 30 semi-inebriated people wreaking havoc on my beautiful interiors. Am I within my rights to say no? Glenda, via email
How funny you should ask this just as I’m tapping out the last chapter of my forthcoming book, The A to Z
of Festive Stains. It’s sure to be a bestseller since, as well as being a time of celebration and wonder, Christmas is the season of spilt champagne, candle wax, glitter, watermarks, wine rings, duck fat, runny cheese, pine needles in the carpet, Cadbury’s Celebrations melted into the suede sectional and children.
As any seasoned host or hostess knows, spending a proportion of the day on all fours, scrubbing the carpet with soda water and a damp sponge, is part of the job. We smile and smile and smile while nephews and nieces tear through the house with their Super Soakers and their pots of radioactive slime. We feign calm when an aunt arrives with her trio of geriatric Pomeranians and proceeds to feed them bits of prawn meat from the table. We grit our teeth when anyone deploys the ‘Tour de France winner’ style of champagne opening and we try not to put everybody on edge by shouting “COASTER!!” at minutely intervals.
However, such zen-like hospitality requires we be in peak mental and physical condition going in. After a year of renovating, I can only assume you’re a hot mess of cortisol and plaster dust, and a single particle of liver pâté hitting your parquetry is going to send you into psychotic meltdown. For everyone’s benefit, it’s got to be a firm “no” on having it at yours this year.
Of course, you don’t want to seem precious about your interiors and if you’ve been boring them stiff all year, talking endlessly about your entertaining areas, then refusing to entertain in them now will seem churlish. So as not to offend, I suggest you make sure that occupancy certificate gets lost in the post, so that refusing to host is simply a question of you looking out for their safety. In a sense, that’s true. Every year we spend Christmas Day at my mother-in-law’s house and I know this is a bit of an odd question to send in, but she is quite ‘open’ and doesn’t have locks on her bathroom doors. I get really anxious every time I need to go to the loo, in case somebody walks in. Can I ask her to install some before our stay? Kirsten, Turramurra, NSW When you are a guest in someone else’s home on Christmas Day, the loo is so much more than the loo. It’s a refuge, a personal haven, the only place you can go to get respite from the madness and bickering and drunk Uncle Ron. Heaven is sitting on the lid for a few moments, tapping out a series of SOS texts to friends and burying a wedge of concrete-like fruitcake in the wastebasket in blissful solitude. To be caught at it would be embarrassing for all, even if your mother-in-law is the type to say, ‘We’re all friends here’ while streaking through the kitchen in a flapping silk robe, fresh from the bath. You don’t want to come off as prudish, so your best course of action is The Pointed Present. You know it – the guide to decluttering for a hoardy flatmate, a lovely deodorant gift pack for the colleague who bikes in every day. In this case, a brass bolt and a cordless drill. Peace to one and all.