We are lucky that we are going to my in-laws for Christmas this year and that there is plenty of room for us all but if that wasn’t the case and we were in fact hosting, it would be much more of a palava!
We only have a small dining table and four chairs but if we were hosting, we would need to either get a bigger dining table and more chairs or just try to squeeze some more chairs – perhaps some stackable chairs to minimise storage space – for us all to sit on. As it stands, there will be six of us for dinner at my in laws (myself, Jack, Steve, Steve’s parents and his brother) whereas if we were hosting as we have promised to do one year, it would be all six plus my parents too – a nightmare (especially when we have a tiny kitchen too!).
I do wonder how some people who have the whole family round manage to seat everyone and the storage problems the extra seating brings up – when we lived in our small cottage before Jack came along, we had no storage space so couldn’t really have people round to eat unless it was a takeaway on our laps on the sofa.
Now we live in a slightly bigger (but still relatively small) two bedroom house and have a garage to store stuff I do sometimes consider buying extra seating or a bigger table that we could store in there – although it isn’t at the top of my priorities, of course!
What do you do when you have your extended family over for dinner, especially at Christmas time? How do you make space?
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We are lucky enough to have scored an extendable 6 seater table with chairs for about 20% of its original cost on a local selling site, its a tad big for the room but it works, and with a little sofa shuffling we had 7 of us for Christmas last year but could have managed 10! If we didnt have that i’d have bought a folding plastic table and chairs or looked at hiring them!