Party clean-up will have you reconsidering hosting at your home. Hosting a Friendsgiving at your house in the next couple of weeks? Don’t fret, we are approaching ten years of Friendsgivings in our home. I am here to share some trade secrets that I’ve picked up over the years.
1. Make it a Buffet
While creating a tablescape is tempting and “impress your guests 101”, consider all of the things involved in making each table setting just right. Each setting has at minimum 6 elements that will require purchase, cleaning, drying, and storage. If your Friendsgiving is more party than formal dinner like ours (we call ours the “Pre-Game”), than you’ll want to have a buffet. That doesn’t mean you have to be anti-climatic with your decor, create a buffet center-piece (or side-piece, make sure your buffet table is functional). You can fulfill all of your design wants into just one (or more) locations with much less to clean.
2. All guests bring foil pans
I know, in the age of Pinterest and Instagram, optics are everything but who’s looking (read: around) when the host has to clean all those fancy serving and dinner plates? Assuming your Friendsgiving is a potluck (cuz isn’t that a Friendsgiving rule?), friends want to show off their culinary skills and fancy dishes. Pull rank, you’re the host, only fancy dishes ’round those parts are yours, if you so choose.
Then your friends may want their fancy dishes back that night, so you’re going to have to find an alternate dish (a’hem foil pan) to hold the food in (#thosepeople always leave early). Or #thosepeople leave early and leave their fancy dish for you to wash later. It’s a lose-lose, unless you have an all foil pan rule.
PS. From one self-proclaimed environmentalist to another: You don’t have to save the foil pans (they’re not recyclable). In the season of giving, here’s a gift: let go!
Bonus: Foil pans are a space saver and you can actually keep the food warm throughout the night with those handy foil pan holders (wire stands) and you maximize table space by having things high, low, front and back.
3. Use plastic cups
and utensils, and plates, and paper napkins
While it’s tempting to purchase the cool mason jar glasses and personalize them, you’ll have to clean them, which won’t be so cool. Just buy the fancy plastic cups, you know those like-crystal tumblers, or the clear plastic cups.
I don’t have red cups when I’m hosting, I left those in college.
4. Assign "trash men"
Or if you’re being gender neutral: environmental services.
Because your disposable items will pile up, and people will return to the buffet for seconds, thirds, and fourths so will the trash. Stock up on strong trash bags and identify a few people in advance to ask to take out the trash throughout the night. And if your Friendsgiving is anything like ours, you’ll need recycling men for the liquor bottles too.
5. Buy beverages in bulk
People tend to hold on to their cups for fear of the cups running out and eternal thirst. If you have soda cans, water bottles, and juice boxes (in touch with your inner child?) then you (or your trash men) will be picking up all of those half-filled bottles all night. Instead buy gallons and liters let people fill as they go OR make a punch, like the apple cider in a crock pot.
6. Rent tables and chairs
Have planned a great big Friendsgiving party and then realized your guests have no where to sit and your food has nowhere to go? Rent tables and chairs.
You won’t have to store them later, because yes, storage counts as clean-up.
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