Don’t Bring Flowers to the Party
Your intentions are good. You learned a long time ago that a polite guest never shows up empty-handed at a dinner party, and you’ve stuck with it. On the way to the holiday, you always take with you a bouquet of wildflowers from Trader Joe, which you will generously throw into the arms of the owner upon arrival. You are polite! You are worried about the details!
Unfortunately, your efforts to be a good guest are in vain. When someone is throwing a party, when they scamper around the kitchen, frying, watering, stewing, wiping the counters and setting the table in the last moments before the guests arrive, they don’t need anything but another task. And when you, thoughtful, ring their doorbell with a bunch of flowers, you create more work for your restless host. He must find a vase or other vessel of a suitable size, fill it, cut the stems and find a place for these flowers. But these are trifles! – you cry. It takes two seconds to throw this anemic clutch of alstroemeria into a jug! They can trim the stems later! These are flowers, not a screaming baby!
I can hear you, but your host – if he’s a host worth attending – doesn’t have milliseconds to spare. Most likely, he is in intense heat, trying to clean himself up, stuff the pillows on the couch and make sure that there are no hairs on the bathroom sink in the last seconds before the flood. He wants you to be at his party, he wants you to be there about 10 minutes after he said to arrive (never, never come right on time – no host is ready at 8pm sharp, and woe to the idiot who comes early , the sadist) and he wants you to pour yourself a drink and start mixing so he can finish cooking.
It’s the same with the birthday parties that are thrown in bars, when millions of people come and go, buy injections and scream to the music. Where the hell should a birthday girl put a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of daisies, if not on a pile of coats in the corner, where they’ll definitely be crushed? Flowers are fragile, and just because every supermarket or corner store sells them for ten bucks right at the entrance does not mean they are a good gift for the owner.
What is a good present for the owner? As we said earlier, amaro (or other specialty liqueur) is a thoughtful and original gift that the owner does not have to deal with right now, but he will appreciate it later.