This is my favorite Christmas book. It’s about two dolls who live in a fabulous dollhouse and get dressed up in fancy dresses to celebrate Christmas. You can see the appeal.
Have a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, dear readers! We are taking a short break for the holidays but will be back with a brand new post on January 2!
In the meantime catch up on some relevant posts to guide you through all your holiday etiquette needs:
If all else fails, watch Santa Claus Conquers the Martians because it is on Netflix and it is amazing.
The holiday season can be fraught with etiquette perils. You mostly already know how to deal with your family and all the assorted drama. But how do you handle a whole month of holiday parties with their own different rules?
White Elephant Exchange:
I think White Elephant exchanges are the most fun type of Christmas present giving exercise, followed closely by it’s cousin, the White Elephant where you bring nice stuff (is there are a real term for this?). The premise is that you find something in your home that is pretty new, maybe it’s something someone else bought you as a gift that you do not want, and you bring it (wrapped) to the party. Then all the gifts go in the middle and the guests take turns selecting a gift and opening it. The fun part is that instead of opening a new gift, a guest can “steal” one of the already opened gifts. Some people put a limit on how many times a gift can be stolen before it is “dead” and must be kept by the last person to steal it. If one person’s gift is stolen, they can choose to open one of the wrapped gifts or steal someone else’s gift.
This type of party is best for groups that don’t know each other well.
Etiquette Pitfalls:
Secret Santa:
The Secret Santa is a more refined gift exchange, in which you are assigned a person to get a gift for ahead of time. This is a nice way of doing gifts because everyone gets something personalized that they will probably like, but you only have to buy a gift for one person.
Etiquette Pitfalls:
Cookie Exchange:
A cookie exchange is a party in which everyone brings one type of cookie and brings enough that they can give, say, a dozen of those cookies to each party guest. That way, each person brings, say, 6 dozen of one type of cookie but brings home 6 dozen of six different types of cookies. This way, you can have a wide variety of cookies to eat during the holiday season but only have to bake once. A big time saver if you are really into cookies.
Office Party:
Jaya just wrote a killer piece in The Guardian about office holiday parties, so you should go read that first. I’ll wait.
Etiquette Pitfalls:
Gifts for Everyone:
Presumably you know what to do when it comes to getting gifts for close friends and family. But what do you do when you have to get gifts for other people?
Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake” but she might have said “let them follow the rules” because there were a lot of rules to follow at Versailles. For the king and queen as well as the courtiers.
Seating arrangements: whether or not you were allowed to sit in the presence of the king and queen was determined by your rank. The king and queen sat in armchairs along with any visiting monarchs, the brothers or children of the king were allowed chairs with no arms, other very high ranked people were allowed stools. Everyone else had to stand.
Around the Palace:
A very public life: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, as king and queen were subjected to close public scrutiny at all times. Every morning, Marie Antoinette (and the king in his own room) had to go through a ceremony called a levee in which she was awoken and washed and dressed by her courtiers in front of anyone with a high enough rank to be allowed to enter. The couple also had to eat dinner publicly during the Grand Couvert. Anyone of rank could crowd into the room to gawk at the king and queen, as long as they were dressed properly, ie men had to wear swords (luckily you could rent one if you forgot yours!). Marie Antoinette hated this ritual so much that she would pick at her food and have her real dinner sent to her rooms later.
Part of the reason etiquette was so important at Versailles was that the French kings brought all of their nobles to court to keep an eye on them and prevent them from developing their own power centers in their home regions and becoming a threat to the monarchy. The king also used the elaborate and constantly changing etiquette to keep the courtiers in check and on their toes. If you followed all the rules and did everything splendidly, the king might take notice of you and allow you more and more access to him. With that access came influence and power. If you did something to disgrace yourself, the king wouldn’t even “see” you if he passed you, thus you ceased to exist as far as any political influence went.
Perhaps a bit intimidating.[Via Wikimedia Commons]
One of the things we talked a lot about in my classes was how to make museums more accessible and less intimidating to members of the community who might not be historic museum goers. Part of the reason people find museums intimidating is that there is a belief that there are a ton of rules that you might not know about. That’s not really true. The only real rule is to never touch the art/exhibits unless you are specifically encouraged to touch them. Everything else is more to avoid annoying everyone else:
Via [Wikimedia Commons]
I was never specifically taught good telephone manners, I think, my house was pretty relaxed about it- we answered the phone with “hello” and I don’t recall ever asking “may I ask who is calling” or anything like that. But for the most part, I don’t think people really expect that. Though those kind of extra good manners do help out sometimes.
I have a great etiquette book from the 1950s called Etiquette for Young Moderns that lays out telephone manners as:
A lot of these rules are still actually pretty good! Even for cell phones!
I think some key things for telephone etiquette today are:
uncommon-courtesy.com 
