Hostess Gifts

We’re just back from a trip to France where we stayed with John’s colleagues. For my children, I packed enough Dramamine to halt the queasy gut of a horse on a cargo ship. For our hosts, I packed up a bunch of gourmet Irish treats – teas, ginger biscuits, handmade chocolates - from our local specialty grocer. I knew it was risky bringing edibles to France, since the French have better treats overall. But what I didn’t realize is that any nice tea or biscuit or chocolate you can get in Ireland is also available in any old supermarket in France, thanks in part to the homogenizing force of the European Union. Of course the French won’t stand for their culinary culture to be watered down by cheap imports, so they still have truly outstanding regional French artisanal products available at their corner specialty shops. All this to say that what I produced as a hostess gift turned out to be basically a small bag of utterly mundane groceries. We’ve been guests in people’s homes this year more often than at any other time in our lives, so you’d think all the practice I’m getting selecting hostess gifts would be improving. But so far this year, I’ve been striking out disastrously. I brought a nice bottle of Irish whiskey to the friends we stayed with in Croatia, only to discover they don’t really drink. They were, of course, quite gracious about receiving it, but it was embarrassing to see it kicking around the living room floor all week. I hope they’ll use it as a doorstop. The homemade chocolate chip cookies I brought to our friends in Cork could have killed off their whole family. Turns out, Trish and her three kids have wheat and dairy allergies, so the butter, flour, eggs and just about everything else in the cookies were verboten. Allergies are less common in Ireland than in the US, so I figured I was pretty safe as long as I didn’t show up with a basket of kittens. I thought at least I had my bases covered because I also brought my own children’s favorite toy, perler beads, for their kids. (Perler beads are tiny colorful tube shaped beads that kids insert onto spiky animal shaped forms. The spikes hold the beads in place, then a parent irons the form and, presto chango, instant art.) Here’s some advice: If you like your friends, never bring perler beads into their home. Five children managed to strew the little beads all over the carpeted bedrooms and hallways of their second floor. I didn’t notice this until I was putting the kids to bed that night. Hoping I could tidy them away before our hosts (Trish and her husband Andrew, pictured here with John and daughters) noticed, I got down on my hands and knees and started to pick up the little beads, which of course jumped all over the carpet as I tried to sweep them up with my hands. I had barely made a dent in the mess when I realized Andrew was about to come out of the shower and walk down the hall to his room. I ducked into the linen closet so I wouldn’t embarrass him since he was only wearing a towel. He couldn’t avoid walking on all the beads that I hadn’t managed to scoop up, and they stuck to the wet soles of his bare feet. I saw him bend over to brush them off, which is really hard to do and keep your towel on, so I didn’t look too hard, just long enough to see him plant his left foot onto a spiky plastic puppy dog form. “Jaysus!” he cursed to himself. “What is all this…what are these bloody things everywhere?” At least now I know to bring band-aids and a new vacuum cleaner to their house the next time we visit. But in truth I’m totally gun-shy about selecting hostess gifts, so my newest tactic is to hand the duty over to John. I tested my strategy when we had dinner at his boss' house Saturday night. John selected an aged bottle of French wine, something expensive with the region, the chateau, even the dirt the grapes were grown in named on the label. I knew it was completely appropriate the moment we set foot in the house. Donal, John’s boss, and his wife, Joan, have a formal Victorian home in the heart of Dublin that you could imagine the queen would be happy to inhabit, if Ireland had a queen. The first course they served us was a smoked pepper, salmon and tomato tartlet. I was totally intimidated, thinking about the turkey I served when I had them over for dinner. (Turkey, for christsakes… What was I thinking? And I put some peanuts in a bowl and crossed appetizers off my list. Myles licked them to see if they were honey roasted! Must improve dinner party game…) Plus, I was seated next to Donal. Turns out Donal was so fun to talk to that the turkey flashbacks subsided as the conversation swung on. Somebody started talking about wine. Donal turned to me and asked, “Do you know how I buy wine?” Before I could babble something about vintage he blurted out, “I buy what’s cheap! And if I like it, I go back and buy a case!” He grabbed a fresh bottle from a box under the sideboard and opened it up. Joan looked at me, shook her head and rolled her eyes at him. But I loved his honesty. It prompted me to reach for the bottle of red and help myself to another glass. More than once. What the heck, it was cheap, and I liked it! After dinner, Donal broke into embarrassing-stories-about-people-at-the-table, and I thanked God he spared me by not bringing up the turkey. He passed around a box of chocolates and said, “When I came home with these truffles, Joan asked me why I bought them and I said, "Because they were cheap!"” Ha ha! These too! I took one from the box. No chance I wouldn’t like them, since I couldn’t taste anything at that point anyway, because I’d had so much of that happy wine.