I was flipping through my new Food Network magazine tonight and came across and article that talks about a site that brings people together for home-cooked meals. This site has created a "matchmaking service" just for Thanksgiving. And I put matchmaking in quotes because it says it's like online dating.
If you're the host you can post your menu and how many seats. And then you can go through requests from prospective diners and pick the best person.
Do you think this is an awesome idea or would you think your host is BSC if you were to arrive and a complete stranger that no one knows is sitting next to you for Thanksgiving?
Re: Invite a Stranger to Dinner
When I was in college, there was a professor who would extend an invite to his students to his house for Thanksgiving. I know of several classmates who accepted because they lived out of state and flying home for Thanksgiving wasn't feasible. That's the closest I've ever heard of, though.
I went to college about two hours from my parents' house. There were kids that couldn't afford to go home for tgives and Xmas. So we had them at our house. It was interesting and made for more than the usual family dinner conversation.
This is what my parents did too. But they lived about 20 minutes from school.
No thanks! I'm too scared of strangers being wackadoodles.
I also get very concerned when someone doesn't have at least ONE person in their life. Like not one friend, crazy uncle, coworker where you can go for the holiday? You are probably a psycho if you can't maintain at least one relationship in the universe. This doesn't apply to the students and people living in new or foreign cities, I think it's awesome that some teachers and locals invite them over.
Sounds interesting in theory but I'm so worried about getting sick from improper food handling.
Dinner with the Smileys
When they retired they started inviting all of mine and my sister's friends over for holidays.
I don't know if I would invite total strangers, but if I've meant them once, like at one of FI'S comedy functions, and I knew they needed a place to eat for the holiday I would invite them.
@adk19 Go for it. We always hosted the big family holidays at our house growing up because we had the big house, and well my parents, especially Mom, liked to cook. We moved soon after I left elementary school to a place where we knew no one. Mom still loved hosting and simply wrote hand written invites to all of our neighbors in our division inviting everyone over for a 'Holiday Open House' on Christmas Eve. It was put that way so anyone of any religion was welcome (many of our jewish friends loved that we hosted in then because they had a place to go on Christmas Eve).
Anyway - as I said we were new to the area, living there only 3 months and knew just our direct neighbors. We had over 40 people show up from couples to whole families. It was fantastic!!! We knew about 10 of the people/kids before they walked in the door. She kept doing it for probably 4 years before it was too much for her. She still misses it sometimes - but thankfully my DH's family does something similar now and invites my parents to their event - mom's in heaven again enjoying the gatherings.
Moral of the story - do it. Take a step outside the norm, you'll love it, and so many others would love it too. Most of the people who came that first year didn't have other plans as they were from out of town too, or others came after their families events finished up. It was such a success the first year that we had more and more people come the next years from word of mouth. Such a blast and a tradition I hope to start when we have a house/family.
My mom regularly had "strays" as she lovingly call them for holidays. Usually it's someone at least someone in the family knows either friends or coworkers, but a few times its been the random Starbucks barista or grocery cashier who she felt bad was going to be alone for the holidays