Hosting the whole family for the holidays again felt like a heavy burden as Donna stared at her cramped list of fourteen names. You can reduce your holiday stress by following a few simple organization tips to manage the workload.
She typed *what time should we expect you* and set the phone face-up on the counter next to the celery. The thumbs-up came back in eleven seconds. She put the phone in her pocket and picked up the knife and started on the onions, the good knife, the one with the black handle she'd had since before Carol's first wedding.
Gary came through the door at noon with his jacket still on and aimed himself at the couch like a man who had somewhere to be. Ted cracked his own Modelo on the kitchen doorframe - the spot in the paint that had been cracking for three years from exactly that - and drifted toward the television. From the good armchair, the wingback with the taped leg, her mother raised her voice over the football to ask whether Donna had used the French's this time - the crispy kind, not the other kind. Donna slid the casserole dish an inch further back on the counter so her mother couldn't see the label.
The water ran too hot and she didn't turn it down. In the window, Gary's sock feet were up on the ottoman she'd reupholstered herself, the one with the nail heads along the bottom, and Carol was laughing at something on Ted's phone - her head tipped back the way it went when she hadn't done any of the dishes. Twenty-two, Donna thought, and held the good plate under the stream, the one with the blue rim that had belonged to her mother's mother, the one nobody else would think to wash carefully. She set it in the rack and reached for the next one.
Her daughter Maya had the good plastic wrap - the kind that actually clung, and was pressing it tight over the top of the green bean dish, smoothing out the bubbles with her thumb the way Donna had shown her when she was nine. "Mom, you should just tell people to bring more stuff," she said - not looking up, the roll of wrap still spinning in her hand. "I know, I know," Donna said, and picked up the dish towel from the counter - the one with the faded roosters on it, and folded it into thirds, the long way first, then across, the same fold she'd made every night of her adult life. She set it on the oven handle and turned back to the sink.
She smoothed the Post-it once against the counter before she folded it - the names still legible under the crease, and slid it into the drawer next to the Szechuan Garden menu and a magnet shaped like a lobster from somewhere coastal, Maine or Maryland, she couldn't remember which trip. The drawer stuck a little at the end and she pushed it shut with her hip the way she always did. The kitchen light was still on over the stove, the one with the bulb she'd been meaning to replace - throwing its yellow cone onto the dish towel on the oven handle, the roosters faded almost to nothing. She turned it off and stood there for a moment in the dark before she went upstairs.
She found the calendar on the counter in the morning, the December page face-up, a covered bridge in Vermont, and someone had written *your house? * in pencil in the square for the twenty-fifth - Carol's handwriting, the letters big and slanted the way they'd been since third grade. Donna stood there in her socks on the cold tile and looked at it. She got a pen from the drawer, the blue one with the chewed cap, and wrote *heavy cream* in the margin where there was room, and then *extra chairs* - and then she tore the corner of a paper towel off the roll and wrote *call rental place* on that and stuck it to the cabinet door with the lobster magnet.
She pulled the extra leaf for the table out from behind the coat closet door, where it had been standing since last January, and carried it through with both arms, the edge of it catching the hallway wallpaper at the same place it always caught, the little scrape she'd been meaning to touch up with paint she no longer had the color of. She set it down on the dining room floor and got on her knees to find the bracket underneath the table - the brass one that had to be turned with a quarter because the slot had stripped years ago, and fished a dime out of her pocket instead, and it worked the way it always did. The leaf went in with a sound like a door closing. She stood up and looked at the longer table in the quiet room and went to the linen closet for the cloth, the good one, the white one with the drawn-thread border her mother had used and her mother's mother before that - folded in its plastic bag on the top shelf where Donna had put it away in January, smoothed and waiting.
She laid the cloth down the center of the table and smoothed it toward the far end with both palms, the drawn-thread border hanging even on both sides, and then she went back to the linen closet and stood there looking at the shelf until she found the extra napkins, the paper ones from the party store - still in their plastic sleeve with the autumn leaves printed on them, because there were only twelve cloth ones and there had never been more than twelve. She counted the chairs already around the table - six - and counted the chairs she'd need to pull from the kitchen and the folding ones behind the coats and got to fourteen and then stood in the doorway a moment, and then went back to the drawer and got the pen, the blue one, and added *Maya's boyfriend* below *extra chairs* on the paper towel - pressing hard because the cabinet door was soft. She tore a second paper towel square and wrote *napkins (more)* on that and stuck it next to the first one under the lobster magnet, the two squares side by side, and stepped back and looked at them, and then turned and went to set the table with what she had.
