Martha Stewart and the Death of the Party

When was the last time you had friends over for a party? I'll give you some slack here, maybe not a big blow out, just 3-4 friends, for dinner and drinks or maybe a movie. And Christmas with your family doesn't count. That's obligation, not a party. I bet it was a long, long time ago.

People only really have three parties now in their adult lives. Their first marriage. The second marriage (usually smaller), and their funeral. That's like 1/2 a party. You're there, but not really in on the events.

I blame Martha Stewart.

Actually Martha is just the mouth piece for an over budgeted knick knack / catering / specialty item industry. The wedding industry is the pinnacle of this nightmare. A quick cruise through the web and I found these scary stats: In the last reporting year, which was a recession year mind you, we spent an estimated $59,599,378,360 on weddings in this country. That's billion, with a B.

That ranks U.S. wedding spending right between the Gross National products of the Czech Republic and Pakistan. No wonder the Pakistanis hate us. We spend more on weddings than they earn on everything. Maybe a good way to fight terrorism would be to move all our weddings to Pakistan, thus doubling the GNP of the country. The resulting wealth and good will would do more damage to the radical terrorists than all the droid planes we could ever make.

Just on invitations alone, a category which includes things like shower invites, place cards, and those awful 7 pound 43 part actual invites we spend an average of $1117 per wedding. For $1117 I could throw a hell of a party for 30 of my best friends this Saturday and invite them all back again on Sunday to do it again.

So why blame Martha? She's the enabler of inaction. Martha and her day time hostess with the mostest TV offspring, have convinced us that we can't have a party unless everything is 'perfect'. Perfect food, perfect pairings, perfect doilies, perfect ribbons on every perfect fucking chair, even perfect barf buckets, for the perfect puke, from the perfect cosmos you MUST have in order to have a party.

Bullshit. You need to invite people over to have a party. That's it. I did it last week on $40 in food and a couple bottles of wine I had around. We watched a good movie, had dinner, and a great time. Fuck perfect. Have fun.

This idea that you need all this crap to spend time with people you like, has meant we never spend time with people we like. Instead we spend more time with people we don't know, who try and act like our friends while they sell us crap we don't need on TV. I prefer real people. Martha Stewart is not my friend.

Sources: http://www.theweddingreport.com (yeah freaking scary)
http://www.nationmaster.com.