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Having A Miss Behaved Holiday by Catharine Bramkamp

It's that time of year again! One which some of us look forward to and others dread; the time to decorate our homes for the family holiday gatherings. July 4th or Memorial Day reunions do not involve tinsel, trees, ornaments, lights, or fancy menus. Catharine shares with us more of her Miss Behaved thoughts ...

During the holidays, it is again fashionable to denigrate poor Martha but-all-my-friends-inside-trade Stewart. One Miss Behaved woman remembers accidentally watching an early Martha Stewart program in the mid-eighties.

For Thanksgiving dinner, Martha hollowed out a pumpkin, gilded it, and used it as a centerpiece filled with savory homemade pumpkin soup. The early Miss Behaved reaction was "What the hell is she doing?"

The answer is, building an empire. And it is quite possible to admire the effrontery of the messenger while still ignoring the message.

That established, how does the Miss Behaved women go about creating a festive party atmosphere for her family, set a holiday table that could be photographed for the cover of Victoria magazine, complete complicated end of the year tasks at work, shuffle the children to extra rehearsals, attend important, lengthy sports awards ceremonies in which her child will be called on last and winterize the dog?

She doesn't.

Since the pages of a Miss Behaved Missive are the only place you will find this kind of advice; we'll put it right here. She doesn't, they don't, we don't.

Really Miss Behaved holiday entertaining does not include gilt pumpkins or charming mismatched china place settings. Miss Behaved holidays evoke a special holiday glow that is not the flush of exhaustion but rather the reflected glow achieved by placing bees wax candles on every available surface, some outside in paper bags if you live in California.

What, then, does a Miss Behaved holiday house look like? How can you tell if you're headed down that Miss Behaved path of incompetent yet exciting holiday entertaining? If your reaction to the suggestion that candles add a touch of excitement and novelty to the house for the holidays is, they certainly do, candles beckon my three boys to plunge their chubby fingers directly into the hot wax and create those novel wax covered fingers, perfect for startling Grandma, and most of us admit that when the holly centerpiece caught fire, it was very exciting, then you've already embraced the Miss Behaved holiday concepts.

The first thing the Miss Behaved entertaining guides suggest is to ditch the bees wax candles. Real candles are easily replaced with plastic candles complete with tiny electric light bulbs in the shape of a flame. Without the candles, decorating becomes easier and less prone to flare-ups.

Some Miss Behaved people even go as far as treating Christmas as the birthday celebration that it is. They decorate with left over birthday streamers and lights in the shape of little pieces of cake, both of which are appropriate, and if positioned right, artistic. The plastic cake lights can be strung in between the plastic evergreen garlands on the stairs. Paint the extension cord green and drape it elegantly along the remainder of the wall and run down the edge of one of the doorways. No one will notice.

Another Miss Behaved suggestion for holiday entertaining is to only entertain people you really, really love, that way you won't have to decorate much at all. Every Miss Behaved women knows that one only decorates to impress strangers, true friends don't care. Ask guest s to bring extension cords and more lights..

Serve take-out food. This is so obvious we won't even elaborate except to say that if you spent $250 at Safeway and have a club card and win a turkey just in time for the holidays, then for heaven's sake make sure the bird is cooked, stuffed and comes with all the "fix'ins". This means there will be plenty of room left in the kitchen to pour and mix drinks. A heavily spiked eggnog is key to a festive holiday evening. Guests will either become extremely happy and forgetful, or pass out, both good Miss Behaved options.

Begin the evening with the one bottle of good wine and switch to the cheap wine during dinner. If you are feeling even a little like Martha Stewart, you can spend your weekend steaming off the wine labels from the good wine and sticking them onto the cheap wine. Not as easy as it looks is it? If you were more gifted, it would be an easy project taking up no more than five hours of your time. But then again, if you were gifted, you'd be worth more and could afford decent wine.

Part 2 of Catharine Bramkamp's "Having A Miss Behaved Holiday"

Humorous Book Recommendations:             [ view all ]
Being Miss Behaved: Humorous Essays For The Politically Incorrect
[Catharine Bramkamp; 201 pages]
After enjoying excerpts, such as Flour Babies and Dressing Like an 8th Grader, shared here at Humor Is Relative - why not order the book to read more! Catharine will have you laughing and shaking your head with her Miss Behaved essays. Can you relate?

The beauty of 'spacing' children many years apart lies in the fact that parents have time to learn the mistakes that were made with older ones -- which permits them to make exactly the opposite mistakes with the younger ones.
-- Sydney J. Harris

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The most important a father can do for his children is to love their mother. -- Theodore Hesburgh

I never see any home cooking. All I get is fancy stuff.
--Duke of Edinburgh