Resident Party Planner

I like parties. I like planning them. I like holding them. (I don’t like cleaning the house to get ready for them, or cleaning the house once they’re done.) Ever since I was in high school, I was happy to call up my friends and organize some kind of activity, whether it was getting together to go to a movie, go out to dinner, or just go over to someone’s house and hang out, I liked making all the phone calls and getting it all organized. (Probably a sign of impending librarianship, I suppose.)

I still like doing it these days. (Don’t get me wrong: I hate calling strangers on the phone. I have no idea why I’m so comfortable calling friends but can’t stand calling people I don’t know well. That doesn’t really make sense to me, but I suppose I don’t always have to make sense.) I know that a lot of the time, if someone doesn’t step up and organize fun, fun just doesn’t happen. So I like having a house that can host the fun, and corralling my friends into coming over for the fun. Over the years, we’ve done a slew of different parties. Groundhog Day (of course), Halloween, Christmas, Bowl Games, Super Bowls, New Years Eve, movie nights, game nights, and more. My party-planning has taken a bit of a back seat to the house renovation, just because our house is such a constant mess, but now that we’re getting close to the other side of that, I’m hoping we can fully get back in the swing of things.

It really made me happy, then, to see Daniela step up to the plate and show that she’s really interested in the same sort of thing. She came to me saying that she missed the Halloween parties we used to do, and that she wanted to organize one for this year. I’m tight on time, so it was a great chance for me to hand the reins over to her. She sat down and came up with a list of people to invite, and I helped her work out some of the logistics. (Dinner or no dinner? Trick or treating? What time? What time to meet at the house? When should we finish?)

But that’s the easy part. She also handled calling and inviting people, which seems to be much more difficult for this generation. It wasn’t made any easier by the fact that she was calling actual adults, inviting whole families to the party. I sat next to her, coaching her through it, and she did a really good job. (Especially when it came to leaving messages. That proved to be particularly stressful, but I admired the way she barreled forward and didn’t let it bother her.)

We’ll see where she goes from here. If this becomes a thing she really gets into and enjoys, or if she just tries it out and moves on to other things. For now, I’m just happy I get to go to a party that I’m not completely planning. 🙂

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