Our Annual Open House

I was not planning to write about our New Year’s Day event this year but then after the positive reaction to the Christmas Missive I thought that I would follow up with New Years January 1, 2013 before returning to the art world.

As many of you know, when traveling by air and having to submit to their hub service one can be stuck anywhere from 1 to 4 days in a town where you planned only to make a stop over to change planes.  We were naturally concerned about that since there were storms across the continent around Christmas time and we were traveling from Santa Fe to Northern Michigan and back with our annual open house scheduled for January 1.  There are only two ways out of Traverse City for us, one is through Detroit and the other is Chicago.   Since we committed over 25 years ago to do most of our flying with American Airlines which goes to most of the places we travel and at this point is the only  airline that flies directly into Santa Fe airport, we went through Chicago which is a hub for American.  Miracle of miracles we had no delays going or coming back while people flying through Detroit missed their flights and had to spend an overnight there.

As a result, we were back in town in plenty of time to get the perishable supplies for our annual event.  This is the 13th year we have done given our open house.  An additional concern, however, was that our son, Hunter, stayed with his brother, niece and nephew over New Years and he and Dana had been the caterers for our party in recent years.

Happily we demonstrated to ourselves that we are able to still function on our own.  We just bought much more food than we thought we would need.   We usually expect between 30 and 40 people out of the over 100 we invite.  Then there is the phenomenon that people will write, email and call with the loveliest messages of why they cannot attend.  Top reasons are travel, skiing and New Year’s Day Indian dances.  We had a lovely party’s worth of people regretting our invite!

I always go through the same syndrome of being sure that the party will be an utter failure and no one will come.  But what has always held true for each and every party is that there are different mixes and they all somehow work out.  For years a director of a Native American arts collection seemed to hold things together on her own.   She knew everyone but then she moved back to her native Los Angeles and was not here for a number of our parties.  She actually came back this year and we loved seeing her but she was not the only one who came.  In fact to our utter amazement we had twice the number of people we expected.  Believe me when I tell you we did not have too much food.  Penelope kept popping things in the oven and, of course, we had the usual shrimp, smoked salmon, cheese and fruit as well as various cookies and dairy free, gluten free and vegetarian offerings.  People devoured caramel corn as if it was the only thing on the table.

To our delight a number of children, who are always invited but don’t always come, stopped by with their parents.  For that reason we pulled out the toys belonging to our 32 year old son that he had played with as a child.  So the blocks, Lego, and stuffed animals were a great hit.  Some children are extremely shy and others love people and attention no matter what their ages… come to think of it true of adults as well.  One little boy of 5 had made up a game with his own Lego set which he immediately enlisted me to play with him!  It was a very long game and eventually I explained that I now had to talk to some of the other guests.

When it was all over we had the usual lament that we did not have a chance to talk with all our friends, and even if we did, we did not have enough time to get into any single subject.   Of course, nobody missed us!  People love to mingle and get to meet new people and see and speak with a lot of friends they may not have been in touch with lately. So yes, we plan to keep up our January I tradition and if you are going to be in Santa Fe January 1, 2014 do let us know!