{Friendship Friday} Are you comfortable having friends over to your place?

Thanks so much for your nice comments on my photos from yesterday. I'm also getting some lovely comments via the Flickr superhero group (some comments are too cute telling me I have nice "composition" and whatnot and I'm like "are you sure you're talking about MY photos) which is very affirming!

Good thing too because I'm getting weird about this stuff. I very nearly stopped my car driving home yesterday to go take pictures of leaves! Yes! But I'm going to drive there this weekend because I literally GASPED at the way the light fell on those trees.

Good madness :)

Have you signed up yet? Click here to visit Superhero Designs.

 

So I love how last week's post was such a hot topic. Love it. There are great points made in the comments so go read them if you haven't yet.

I just want to say..... I really LOVE that people didn't go, "what? that's not expensive" but that there was a lovely community spirit. Because as we all know, money can be a sensitive topic.

Onto today. I mentioned last week about opening your homes to others.

Some background.

I used to be a reluctant entertainer.

My mother never ever had people over for a meal - her excuse was money and fair enough, we had sooooo little. The only people who came over were family and always very spontaneously, no "plans", so therefore it was a cup of tea and that was that.

I think a lot of my reluctant behaviour stemmed from there.

But also, I'm not the best cook and we are close friends with some FABULOUS cooks which makes it awkward to offer up your little meals.

We then made friends with people who were not such great cooks and it was refreshing to be around normal people, and it also took off the pressure so we would just take turns to go to one another's house.

However, I was set free in a major way when I read Sandy Coughlin's Reluctant Entertainer. She said three things which were aha moments for me:

1. when you're that reluctant, it's a form of perfectionism (and I don't want to be a perfectionist) because you want things perfect before having people over
2. you need to find your style and do that. If your style is muffins and coffee, embrace it. If it's breakfast or brunch, embrace that. (My style is muffins and coffee, by the way :))
3. the major point of the book...the purpose of having people over is connection and to be hospitable. (connection is one of my top 5 values)

People are not looking at how clean your house is, how well you decorate, cook, entertain, etc.

I realised that's true for me and so it most probably is true for others too.

Ta da!

And now I don't care about those little things and I'm much happier as a result. If other people care, then do they really want to be friends with me or are they coming to judge me? Hmm.

(My mother was horrified one December when she was here. We had friends over and I served.... burgers for supper. Yes, I did. No big deal. We had a lovely time)

I do have one small issue with having people over. We stay on one end of Jhb (barely east) and a lot of friends stay in the north. It does seem to be an issue sometimes for people to come "all the way" to my side of the world. To be honest, I find it very rude because if people invite you, you need to be gracious about where they live. I travel to that side of the world a lot more and while I'm not over the moon about travelling, I focus on the connecting and that is it :)

I mention this because Rachel has commented a couple of times on these friendship posts (go read last week's one) about how her "friends" don't want to travel 20 minutes to get to her. Oy, my blood boils. It's not nice! I only know Rachel through blogging the last 3 - 4 years but she is great and I would travel more than 20 minutes a month to go see her.

*deep breath*

I love talking about this kind of thing so when we were with our friends in Ireland a few years ago, we chatted about having people over and they were horrified.

"Oh no! People here (they're not actually Irish) don't invite people to their homes. We meet in pubs or restaurants only".

He went on to give an example of a REALLY good friend, certainly a BFF, but they'd never been to her house in the EIGHT years they'd been friends. Just not the done thing.

Apparently it's the same in London?

Our other friends said they do have people over and go to other people's houses but they are all South African and here we do that sort of thing so when we move elsewhere, we continue the good old South African tradition of having people over.

So, over to you.

Do you have people over? Is it the usual thing in your community/ country?
How much of a reluctant entertainer are you? Or do you love entertaining? Did you have to get over some issues like I did?

PS I have a friend date on Tuesday. She emailed me today to say, "hey, when are you free this month to go out for supper?" and since we live near each other (!!) we'll go on Tuesday to get the Mimmos pasta special :)

PPS not all's rosy in the land of friendship. I disappointed a friend yesterday really badly and I'm still so mortified I'm blocking it out. Maybe I'll tell you tomorrow.