December, 2018
This party starts with a griefbacon letter from Helena Fitzgerald, which is sadly behind a paywall, but this is the excerpt I sent out to all of my friends asking who wanted to throw a party in december
The end of year is something else, though, a holiday of its own, a bright blossom of failure. Failure is what the songs and the smell of pine needles in the cold, the bright ornament-hung windows and the family dinners, are heralding. If the new year is about what you could do then the end of the year, the last straggle of weeks before the finish line, is about what you didn’t do. It is a festival of failures, the discards, the mistakes, the half-finished constructions.
It is no accident, then, that this is also the most partying time of year, the time when the open bars are most open, when living rooms are most likely to turn into dance floors, when indoor spaces are brightest and most welcoming, when people tend to be messiest and most interesting. Every party is a failure. Parties celebrate giving up. If you go to a party with a responsible goal in mind you aren’t really going to a party. The point of a party, as much as the point of a holiday, has to be uselessness. We make a bonfire of what we haven’t done, what we don’t accomplish, what we leave unfinished.
After which, my dear, witchy friend Alex said she was down to help, but, quote “didn’t have a creative bone in her body” (which was to be proven a lie later). As soon as I heard she was interested, the #witchmas theme was born.
Also, it was planned for the day after a full moon.
And then @caro volunteered to bring her cat, (a black rescue named Minerva after Sabrina the teenage witch) and we were off and running
This was one of the most beautiful parties I have ever thrown. It featured
- Art direction from a creative director at ABC Home & Carpet
- Two journalists giving tarot readings that were described as “very good”
- Witchy custom dripped candles by Caro
- An extremely sensitive ritual circle organized by Alex, that set good intentions for all of us into the new year
- Me sticking my hand into a pot of boiling water and somehow not burning it (pro-tip: Don’t cook black noodles in a black bottomed bot on a black stove in a nearly pitch black kitchen for ~ambiance~ reasons)
- Minerva the cat shitting in my bed fifteen minutes into the party and then being extremely charming for the rest of the night
