Christmas Parties

One of the recurring themes of Eldest Boy's struggle is that he feels like he's socially awkward. He doesn't particularly care for my response of, "Join the club, kid." (Hubby gives a similar response. I suspect that 99% of the world thinks they're socially awkward, but really we're all just normal.)

Regardless, one of the things he's doing to try and combat this, is finding reasons and ways to trick me into having big parties at our house. (I say trick, it's not really tricky. He asks and, because I'm a sucker who wants him to feel good about himself, I say sure.)

Most of the time, these parties (gatherings or hangouts, whatever one wants to call them) are just him and his friends. I'm all for him having groups of friends over and will happily provide pizza and chips.

But sometimes -- like at the start of summer and then again last night -- he gets a wild hair that hubby and I also need to participate in the party, so asks if we can invite whole families.

Which is why we ended up with somewhere around 40 people at our house last night for a Christmas party.

My therapist is trying to get me to see the positives in things...so I guess the big positive is that for ten sparkling minutes before people started to arrive, my house was immaculate.

Of course, then people descended. And those people ranged in age from 18 months to 50+. And the crowd of littles were, largely, unsupervised with hot chocolate. Meaning my floor ended the night stickier than I had thought possible.

That said, all the kids seemed to have a wonderful time. (They were, by and large, in the basement. Although they ran up to get food as we'd set up the dining room as the buffet.) One of them is a burgeoning DJ and brought along his equipment (including a smoke machine! He did not turn that on as there was concern about smoke alarms. I think it would have probably been fine, but I also appreciate his discretion.)

The adults all seemed to also enjoy one another. We hung out largely in the living room with conversation ranging here, there, and everywhere. It was loud. It was amusing. 

It was exhausting.

I got a lot of the house put back together last night (because sticky floors and dropped food are both bad ideas for puppies) and finished it up this morning. But right now, the boys are all out with Trial Life doing an escape room, and the pups and I are reveling in the silence.

If I could go another week or two without another large group of people that I had to interact with, I might just recover.

My question though is this: do the socially awkward go out of their way to plan a party? 

Mrs. Grundy says no.