How to throw a cocktail party
Plus: a glut of bedrooms, a Pentagon war game, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post.
A take I haven’t written elsewhere
How to throw a cocktail party
Twice a year, I throw a cocktail party. It used to be once a year, on New Year’s Eve, with the occasional mid-July counterpart, but after many of our friends had kids, New Year’s Eve was out. Too much travel, too hard to find babysitters.
So now we do spring and fall, typically the Saturday after Easter (in case anyone was giving up liquor for Lent) and Veteran’s Day weekend (well after back-to-school season, clear of Halloween, but before the holiday season begins in earnest). It’s a good rhythm, and one I think more people should adopt.
Why a cocktail party specifically? Several reasons:
People like An Occasion. They like to dress up. They like to see their friends dressed up. There’s nothing wrong with a casual party, but most of us have very few opportunities for grandeur or glamor in our lives. You can make one.
It’s not that much work. I realize the list below has 15 steps, but they’re all pretty simple. A dinner party is definitely a bigger lift. Here, there’s no elaborate cooking. Indeed, there’s no cooking at all. It’s very low-skill. You just need to be able to measure and pour liquids into a pitcher.
It’s not that much money. While the cost isn’t nothing, you’re looking at about $400-$500 all in to give around 40 friends a good night out. Smaller gatherings will be cheaper. Done once or twice a year, this is hardly extravagant. And it’ll be about $50 less after the first party, because you won’t need new glassware.
Sadly, it has come to my attention that many are intimidated at the prospect of throwing a cocktail party. Thus this guide.
Order paper invitations. I’ve been using Papier for this; their invitations are quite unevenly priced for reasons that are mysterious to me, but there are a lot of options priced around $90 for 40 (nice envelopes included). Paper Source is cheaper, though I’m not sure if they come with envelopes. The text is fully customizable, so you can look at invites for any kind of event. Your invitations should include: time (I suggest 7:30 p.m.), location (full address), RSVP mechanism (I invite people to text me and include my number), and something to clarify the expected formality, like, “Cocktail attire requested.” Don’t skip that; you cannot assume people know what “cocktail party” implies.
Distribute your invitations. Do this early—if a lot of your guests have young children, two months ahead is the minimum. Three is better. It takes time to make arrangements. I do most of my invitation distribution during the post-service social hour at church. If you go to church, this is probably your best bet. If you don’t go to church, consider going to church. For anyone who doesn’t attend church with you, you’ll have to track down mailing addresses. Don’t skip this either. You cannot invite people to a cocktail party using a Facebook event or an evite. It is not 2015, and this is not a movie night for tweens.
Don’t overthink your guest list. I generally have plans for about half of the 40 invitations I order. These are for nearby family, good friends, people in my small group, and clergy. (Clergy like parties too! Let them have fun!) Beyond that, I invite whatever friends and acquaintances happen to be in my sightline at church while my children are behaving themselves. You could also ask your literal neighbors. At this point, you’re not looking for intimate friends, kindred spirits. You’re not Anne of Green Gables. You’re Holly Golightly. Invite freely, generously. Everyone loves to receive a beautiful invitation to a fancy party.
Go to the thrift store. You’ll need glasses and pitchers. They don’t need to—indeed, shouldn’t—match. I have over 50 glasses, some of which you can see above: punch cups, rocks glasses, highballs, cordial glasses, goblets, and every kind of coupe. You can’t have too many coupes. The three kinds of glasses I don’t recommend are: anything for beer (too big for liquor), anything with an inward curve (like a hurricane glass or a red wine glass: awkward to drain and typically also too big), and straight-sided martini glasses (dangerously sloshy). You’ll also need one pitcher for every 8-10 guests. I have three pitchers that hold 50-75 ounces each and a punch bowl that can accommodate up to 150.
Get a sparkly tablecloth. You don’t need to decorate much, but a sparkly tablecloth is nice. I have something like this. It doesn’t show stains and clearly signals that it’s a party.
Select cocktail recipes to batch in your pitchers. I like to do a theme for these. This past spring it was tiki drinks and gins & tonics; this fall, all four cocktails used amari (Cynar, Nonino, Averna, etc.). I’m tentatively planning to focus the next one on aquavit and absinthe. You want a diversity of flavors across drinks—some sweet, some sour, some bitter or smoky, maybe a savory or spicy one if you’re bold. A word of advice: Almost every recipe you should make sweeter than recommended. This may be a minor cocktail heresy (shh, don’t tell
), but look, people like a sweet drink. Most do not have terribly sophisticated palates, and that’s okay. This is not the moment for them to confront challenging tastes. It’s a party! Add some more simple syrup. See what tastes accessible without veering into juvenile or cloying.Buy the alcohol and mixers ahead of time. These supplies will be your biggest expense and will run $200-300 depending on where you live, what recipes you select, etc. But you will have some partial bottles leftover, and over time these will be the basis of a nice home bar, maybe even subsidizing purchases for a future party. Plan ahead because you may need to special-order some ingredients especially if, like me, you are unfortunate enough to live in a state with a government liquor monopoly. (Sic semper tyrannis to you, Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board.) Don’t forget some nice nonalcoholic drinks for anyone who’s not drinking for whatever reason; give them better than a Coke.
Only get a little food. This is not an eating party. Everyone should have already had dinner. Provide a token amount of finger food: peanuts, chips, chocolates, nothing messy. Yes to pretty paper napkins, no to plates. Don’t encourage anyone to bring anything. This is not a potluck.
On the day of the party, clean everything. There is much to be said for ad hoc, casual, “welcome to our real life” hospitality. This is not that.
Arrange your space. If you have a small apartment or an open floorplan, this will be more difficult. But if you have properly defined living, dining, and cooking spaces, close off the kitchen. No one should be in heels and glitter and standing next to a toaster. If your kitchen has a door, close it. If not, at least turn off the lights in there. The kitchen is a workspace. You wouldn’t invite people to party in your laundry room, would you? You also want to keep people out of the kitchen because it gives the party a smaller footprint, which is very important. Parties are fun when they feel crowded. You need to physically herd people together. It should be loud, but also intimate. Take the chairs from your table and set them in groups of cornered twos and threes for conversation clusters. If your table has leaves, take one out to add clearance so people can mingle.
Batch your drinks and get them in the fridge several hours ahead of time. Don’t put ice in; people can add ice themselves, and you don’t want them diluted. Write small cards with the name of each drink and a brief description—maybe mentioning the base alcohol or dominant flavors—so people know what they’re getting. If anything is particularly boozy or weak, that’s worth mentioning too.
Optional: Set out the rest of your liquor cabinet so people can experiment. Most won’t venture to try, but a few will. If you do this, make sure to offer basic garnishes (lemons, limes, cherries) and mixers (soda, tonic, maybe ginger ale).
Set out the food and drinks and turn on some music. Jazz or bossa nova or something like that. Should be upbeat, few to no vocals, not formal. In December, instrumental Christmas music works. Do not turn on any TVs or other screens.
Get dressed up and have a good time! You’ve done it.
When the night is over, leave most of the cleanup until morning. Things will probably wind down around 11 if your average guest is 30+. If you have little kids, just get all the glassware out of reach. Drink some water and go to bed.
In honor of this guide, get 25 percent off a paid subscription now through Dec. 31 with my cocktail party offer. It’s not as fun as an actual cocktail party, but it’s not bad! Subscribe here:
Intake
“A shortage of housing and a glut of bedrooms,” by
for (but may I humbly suggest you read it in conjunction with my post from almost exactly a year ago, which looked at Census data to determine that while American homes do have more spare bedrooms than we used to, the square footage boom in newer builds is substantially about extra bathrooms and additional public spaces, like secondary living rooms of various kinds)“The secret Pentagon war game that offers a start warning for our time,” by William Langewiesche for The New York Times
[The path of nuclear escalation] is shaped by grave uncertainties. How well do my enemies understand me, and how well do I understand them? Furthermore, how does my understanding of their understanding affect their understanding of me?
These and similar questions stand like the endless images in opposing mirrors, but without diminishing in size. The threat they pose is immediate and real. It leaves us to grapple with the central truth of the nuclear age: The sole way for humanity to survive is to communicate clearly, to sustain that communication indefinitely and to understand how readily communications can be misunderstood.
Crucial to handling the attendant distrust are fallback communications integral to the art of de-escalation—an art that has been neglected and is now dangerously foundering.
Basically, the authors find that a. Churchgoing Finns have more kids than non-Church-going Finns and b. That an ongoing decline in church membership helps to explain the birth rate decline in Finland of late. […] [R]eligiously mixed couples have lower birth rates than religiously homogenous ones. (The gender of the religious partner matters, too: Couples in which the female partner is religious have more kids than ones in which only the male is religious). In other words, secularization has a self-reinforcing effect on fertility—it lowers birth rates even among the remaining religious population by changing who they partner up with.
He That Should Come: A Nativity Play in One Act, by Dorothy Sayers (quick read, quite good, very British)
Output
New work:
Join me and other CT editors next week, on Thursday, Dec. 12, at 8 p.m. ET for a livestream event with the authors of CT’s Book of the Year winner, Gavin Ortlund, and award of merit, Brad East
Broken war math | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
Newly relevant work:
On the subject of fancy parties, I wrote at The Week in early 2020:
Celebrities have the red carpet; the rich go to charitable galas for museums; teenagers have prom. But the rest of us get, if we’re lucky, the occasional invite to a semi-formal wedding, where perhaps your cocktail attire won’t feel absurd but there definitely will be guys in polo shirts.
This is a great loss. Fancy parties shouldn’t be the sole province of the famous, wealthy, and young. (In fact, those are probably the three classes of people who need them least.)
Ours is an informal culture, which is often convenient. But formality has a quality informality can't duplicate—it’s an excitement, a buzz, the slightest light-headedness. Formal wear is a game: The rules make the fun. There is a paradoxical intimacy that comes of talking closely while you all look very grand, an elaborate joy the same conversation couldn't have with everyone in sweats. A fancy party is an occasion for mutual admiration, which we all crave and need. The whole arrangement invites us to tell our loved ones how lovely they are, how we are delighted to be with them. By dressing up we grace not only ourselves but our friends, and they do the same for us, as together we conspire to create a scene at once familiar and extraordinary. This sort of formality can be escapism at its best, a few golden hours to forget there are dishes to wash and tax returns to file and instead enjoy being with each other at our finest.
Read the rest here.
We LOVE your cocktail parties!!! ✨
Obsessed. Every tip is 10/10. Going to try it.