“Parties have a lifespan,” observed a friend of ours, explaining her decision to mothball the shindig she has hosted each spring since the dawn of time. An elegant and exceptionally well-catered open house, our friend’s event had evolved into a landmark on the spring social calendar, faithfully attended by scores (maybe hundreds) of revelers who drifted through for conversation, liquid refreshments, and their annual chance to graze on the best marinaded shrimp ever. A credit to her hospitality, taste, and culinary expertise, our friend’s party was a lovely way to spend an afternoon—one that we, probably like most others that attended, are guilty of taking for granted as a feature of springtime in the Felicianas—kind of like azaleas or hayfever. In its absence we all feel a little bit lost.
Like all great entertainers, our friend’s talent for making a party seem effortless was her undoing. Because as everyone who has thrown one knows, there is no such thing as an effortless party. Each memorable social gathering represents a considerable investment of time, effort, and expense on the part of the host. Then there’s the anxiety; although I have a hunch that host anxiety is the fuel that makes a party good in the first place. The moment you feel like you’ve got your arms around the whole party-throwing enterprise, the event loses the frisson of danger that attends undertakings being made up as they go along, and it’s time to either up the ante, or call the whole thing off before it collapses under its own weight. Thus develops the party arms race.
Back in the seventies and eighties when my wife and her sister were growing up, their mother would throw a country Halloween party to which lots of area schoolchildren would be invited. There would be potluck, a costume contest, and pumpkin carving, then all the kids would be loaded onto a hay trailer and hauled through the darkening woods and fields for a spooky Halloween hayride that is apparently remembered as the highlight of many a local kid’s Halloween. No one seems to remember how many years this party went on for; although there is agreement that as everyone got older, the party became progressively more elaborate until eventually it imploded. What did it in? Probably the year someone had the bright idea of taking the hayride all the way down to the banks of Thompson Creek, where a big bonfire had been set to burning and a theatrical parent recruited to tell ghost stories. While the kids were huddled around the fire getting good and frightened, another grownup slipped away into the trees and climbed into a big, hairy gorilla suit procured for the occasion. Then, at the climax of the ghost story this maniac came rushing and snorting out of the darkness, scaring a couple dozen Woodvillian children absolutely out of their skulls, and ensuring area therapists excellent business in the years to come.
So the bar was set high. For some years beginning in the late nineties, my wife and I revived the country Halloween party tradition of her childhood, only to watch it evolve from the same simple country get-together for pot luck, hayride and pumpkin carving, into a rural bacchanalia that at its peak seemed poised to become St. Francisville’s answer to Burning Man. The year it finally got out of hand, the party involved hundreds of pumpkins, multiple kegs of beer, wood-fired pizza for the two hundred people who showed up, and a bonfire that I’m sure was visible from space. There was also a bathtub-sized punchbowl full of devastatingly effective witches’ brew brought by an invitee who had interpreted the invitation’s ‘Potluck’ clause creatively. While the parents were busy taking advantage of the punch, their children ran amok, forming tribes of feral pirates, superheroes, monsters, witches, and Harry Potters who spent the evening ambushing unsuspecting princesses and pelting one another with marshmallows and pumpkin guts from their respective redoubts. The hayride tractor was hijacked by a drunken Frenchman dressed as a pirate and nearly driven into a pond; and despite the fact that we live in the middle of nowhere, ten miles from the nearest town, we had crashers! The next morning, surveying the landscape of emptied kegs, discarded pizza crusts, disemboweled pumpkins, and discarded Halloween costume elements strewn about the backyard, we had to conclude that the time had come. Our party’s lifespan had run its course. As fun as it had been, it was time to put this particular family tradition into mothballs. Alongside the gorilla suit.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher james@countryroadsmag.com
