The Case for More Parties

Sprinkles, Sparklers, and Speeches

I’ve been thinking about this all week.

We need to have more parties.

I’m fresh off of birthday month, so I could be influenced by the massive sugar intake. In October, we celebrate three birthdays and three baptism days. We celebrated the boys’ birthdays early and twice, once with root beer and once with apple pie, and then again on their actual birthdays because we’re not monsters. It was a lot of partying.

And it was glorious.

yes it is.

None of these celebrations had many moving parts. Each one gave something to my family that I couldn’t really articulate until entrepreneur and author Tiago Forte articulated it for me via audiobook that Jonny was listening to on 1.5 speed in the other room.

His book is called Building a Second Brain and I can’t tell you much about it because, really, I only listened to 45 seconds of it that could be summarized thus (with many apologies to Tiago Forte): “One of the difficulties of modern work is that it’s endless. One project rolls in after the next with nothing to mark each met deadline. For many employees, work is exhausting and tedious. No definite end point in sight, they have little motivation to get better at their jobs.”

And I was like, “Tiago, I feel you – things get that way around here.” Since the authors of audiobooks don’t generally talk back, I just googled him and found a younger, friendlier-looking Elon Musk type who is dedicated to helping people reach their creative potential. I’m going to stop talking about Tiago Forte now, I promise, but his work is interesting stuff if you are the kind of person who is into productivity and organization – or the kind of person who wishes you were…

Anyway. Family life *can* feel that way, too. Stifled by the infinite loops of diapers and laundry and dishes and carpool and when-did-I-last-clean-this-floor, we wonder why we’re doing any of this anyway. It is possible to find joy in those loops, but sometimes, I need something a little punchier. I need a definite end point. I need a party.

Allow me to define the term. To be considered a party, an event must meet all three criteria below:

One: Two or more people in attendance at the same time, at the same place.

Two: An agreed-upon occasion. Examples: birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, feast days, baptisms, baptism days, the first or last day of a job or a project.

Three: Three-ish of the following five things:

1.       Flames

2.       A particular dessert, dish, or drink (or all three, I mean, dream big)

3.       Communal singing

4.       A speech or reading of some kind (note – short)

5.       A loosely-on-theme activity (note – also short)

That’s a party.

That explanation is a lot more complicated than the event has to be. We have some friends who throw a great feast of St. Brigid, patroness of beer, on February 1st (mark your calendars!). One year we had pizza, another year we had homemade bread. The pizza was also homemade, for the record, but parties also allow for the store bought. There was always plenty of beer. Before we sang the doxology together, we read St. Brigid’s prayer. Here’s a version of the prayer from Robert Van de Weyer’s Celtic Fire:

I should like a great lake of finest ale
For the King of kings.
I should like a table of the choicest food
For the family of heaven.
Let the ale be made from the fruits of faith,
And the food be forgiving love. 

I should welcome the poor to my feast,
For they are God's children.
I should welcome the sick to my feast,
For they are God's joy.
Let the poor sit with Jesus at the highest place,
And the sick dance with the angels. 

God bless the poor, 
God bless the sick,
And bless our human race.
God bless our food, 
God bless our drink,
All homes, O God, embrace. 

We need to mark our days, lest they feel endless. My little family partied all the way through October, and it was restorative for us to laugh and sing and light things on fire, even if the only thing we made for a cake was box brownies covered with store-bought frosting and raspberries. Because every party is a definite end point that, in some small way, points toward the definite end point. Celebrating together serves to remind us that we’re not in an infinite loop. We are going somewhere. And the very best is yet to come.