Thanksgiving is almost upon us, the first Great Meal of a season of Great Meals, for which the Good Stuff was created. You know what kind of Good Stuff Etiquetteer is talking about: the silver, china, and crystal that your mothers and grandmothers received when they married (and which you may have passed over in favor of a honeymoon registry). Now is the time to get it out and enjoy using it, and Etiquetteer wants to admonish and encourage you to do so.
People get anxious about using the Good Stuff, for a lot of different reasons. The first, of course, is that it’s a lot of trouble to clean. Especially anything with a gold rim can’t go in a dishwasher. Just dragoon some help from other members of the company to make the cleanup go more quickly.
The Good Stuff was meant to be used! Our fear of breakage has caused us to preserve these Beautiful and Useful Things to such a degree that they’re practically Holy Relics. When Cousin Hepzibah brings out the teacups in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, she tells young Cousin Phoebe “Your great-great-great-great-grandmother had these cups, when she was married . . . They were almost the first tea-cups ever seen in the colony; and if one of them were to be broken, my heart would break with it. But it is nonsense to speak so about a brittle tea-cup, when I remember what my heart has gone through without breaking.” And it’s worth noting that Hepzibah was bringing them out for a special occasion.
People do worry about breakage, understandably. Accidents happen even with the everyday china! But it’s not the end of the world, darlings. We’ve all endured worse, just like Cousin Hepzibah. Just chalk it up as a sacrifice on the altar of Hospitality if something gets damaged. If you end up with uneven pairs of goblets or what have you, just fill in from your everyday gear (starting with the host and hostess, of course). Great Meals at the holidays should not be so fiercely formal that anyone takes issue*.
Finally, it’s perhaps old-fashioned to worry about an “absent-minded” guest purloining a few pieces of sterling silver. Just cut them out of the will if your teaspoons don’t add up!
Etiquetteer would like to wish you and your loved ones a beautiful, fun, and Perfectly Proper Thanksgiving.
*That said, if you end up with so many patterns and styles that your table looks like the dining table in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, well . . . that’s a tender subject.