We have The Penis Table.
Before COVID-19 we would host an xmas dinner party for my relatives. I’d put the leaf in our dining room table and squeeze ten there.
Our adjacent sunroom has a round table that seats four. We have some big rectangular folding tables. I’d put up one of those, with the round table at one end and covered the whole thing with a festive tablecloth.
It looked like a dick, so of course a nephew said, “a penis table!” and the name stuck.
My parents have a large open space and set up enough tables for everybody to gather around. My in-laws have fewer guests for ‘large’ events, and one long folding table suffices.
FTR I always hated being relegated to the kid’s table. I did not want to miss the adult conversation.
I think the case you cite is ridiculous and extreme, but I don’t think you can use it to condemn the concept itself. When I was an actual kid and not a young adult like the young people in your story, I liked having our own table. I really didn’t want to eat silently with a group of adults while they talked about their mortgage rates and investment portfolios. I wanted to be with people my own age who talked about the things I was interested in.
If all 5 "kids " were at the patio table with grandma then there must have been adults at the dining room table so your outcast could have joined them. It seems she saw that as an inferior choice, maybe because indoors after a bad year. If she was the only adult at a table I could see feeling awkward but sometimes things just don’t work out. Balancing on a planter just made things worse.
Surely, in this situation, the graduate is the guest of honor. You don’t seat the guest of honor at the kids’ table, and it makes no sense to put a 19-year-old adult there either. Maaaybe if the other three teenagers were all at the young end of the age range and wanted to hang out together, the kid’s table concept would make some sense for this particular party, but otherwise not so much.
Jasmine: I think the case you cite is ridiculous and extreme, but I don’t think you can use it to condemn the concept itself.
Yeah, I wasn’t condemning it exactly, just reacting to this woman’s attitude that TKT is universal, and the fact that the five teens didn’t automatically head there like homing pigeons was proof that “Kids today have no manners!!!” Mijin, I forgot to ask this in the OP, but I was wondering if other cultures/countries do this. Guess it’s another American Thing.
Also Jasmine: When I was an actual kid and not a young adult like the young people in your story, I liked having our own table. I really didn’t want to eat silently with a group of adults while they talked about their mortgage rates and investment portfolios. I wanted to be with people my own age who talked about the things I was interested in.
True. When I was an actual kid, I would have loved it if there had been even one other kid at these things.
Beesnest: Thirteen people, ten seats at the patio table, six potential seats indoors. Of the three people who lost at Musical Chairs, one was the hostess, who pulled up an indoor chair when she’d finished serving; one was Our Heroine, who chose to sit on a planter, and on a tack; and I don’t know what the third person did or who they were.
And Fretful Porpentine, yeah. If it was his graduation, why shouldn’t he be at the Big Table?
And RitterSport, I hope you’re still reading this. I honestly did not mean that sitting at TKT is crummy, just that the table itself tends to be not ideal!
This. Squared, or quadrupled, or raised to infinity.
If not everyone fits at one table, there are lots of ways to allocate who sits at which one; including first-come-first-serve; guest of honor gets first pick; Grandma and Grandad get the chairs that are most comfortable for them; the 14-year-old whose physical condition means that the chair matters gets the chair most comfortable for them; don’t seat Aunt X anywhere near Uncle Y!; do seat Aunt X who lives on one side of the country next to Cousins A through C who she never sees otherwise; – I could go on for quite a while.
What I actually do is shove the tables next to each other and use an extra-long tablecloth over both of them. Usually a parent sits next to the smallest kids, to supervise. If that doesn’t work, I’ll do a buffet setup and let people sort out their own seating in various rooms. I’ve heard of official kids’ tables, but rarely seen them, even when I was a kid, which was in the 1950’s.
I hope they kept the poor hostess company!
I hope they kept the poor hostess company!
Oh brother. Maybe I should proof my posts for content before I hit send. I wasn’t there, but it sounded like the hostess brought a dining room chair outside, then it was one of those deals where two people move their plates further apart, then turn their chairs at a slight angle so someone can squish between them. Which often happens at outdoor parties; it’s not the Met Gala!
It totally depended on the side of the family when I was growing up. On one side, there were very few kids, so we just sat with everyone else, and were generally either deathly bored by the adult conversation, or we were being teased/harassed about girlfriends, sports, etc… by the old geezers.
On the other side, there were a bunch of kids of various ages- at first, it was my cousins, my brother and myself, but eventually it ended up being my cousins’ kids. Seating was kind of at a premium at the grownups’ table, so there were always a few adult volunteers to sit with the kids- they were more fun generally than the grownups who talked about boring stuff like politics, sports, etc…
As a married person with kids, it’s the same thing- if there are more than a couple kids at an event, we usually make a kids’ table and let them eat together, while we do our adult thing away from them.
I’m also wondering if it was not as cut-and-dried as she makes it out to be. If the patio table had eight place settings with plates and wineglasses and metal utensils, while the dining room table had paper plates, plastic tumblers and disposable utensils, yeah, that would be pretty obviously TKT. (It would also be pretty insulting when the youngest kid is 13, but whatever.) However, if it was like gatherings at my house and other people’s around here, it was more likely, “We’ve wiped down the patio table and put out chairs, and also cleared off the dining room table for people who would rather be in the air conditioning and away from the bugs. Grab a plate and sit wherever.”
Some people just think their way is the one, only, true way. Remember that thread started by the guy who gave his live-in fiance money for a pizza dinner for them to share? She…didn’t wait for him to get home. When…when he got home…she had already eaten three of the breadsticks! To him, this was “one of the rudest things a person can do,” because to him, mealtime was sacred: you eat in the presence of the person who bought it for you, and you eat at the same table with your loved ones. So by eating three breadsticks* before he was there to witness it, she clearly showed she did not appreciate his working to support them, and she loved him less than he did her. Gah.
Anyway, maybe the reason none of the other adults spoke up and told the teenagers to “go inside where they belonged,” and perhaps smacked one or more upside the head, like her mom would have**, was not because they were pushovers, but because it was not a problem for them.
Kayaker, I would love to see a photo of that!
*And I always wondered, was it three out of six, or three out of eight? If she had one left, assuming they were to be split 50-50, did that make her sin a trifle less bad?
**Which actually explains a lot. If it’s true.
Whoops, yes, I see what you mean! and that makes more sense.
One scenario that I could imagine being problematic: if there are several younger children and one older teenager, and the teenager is relegated to the kids’ table. Shit, even a couple years can make a huge difference in maturity levels. I’d be very pissed if I were the teenager in this scenario.
wait she was complaining about the guest of honor and his being with the adults?
this lady as described seems to fit the “karen” meme
Edit I wrote this last night when the thread was new sorry if its all ready been mentioned
My translation of her bitchiness:
“By the time I got to the big table where all main conversation was happening there wasn’t a seat for me. Someone is to blame and it’s not me.”
Buck_Godot: My translation of her bitchiness:
“By the time I got to the big table where all main conversation was happening there wasn’t a seat for me. Someone is to blame and it’s not me.”
You know, sometimes the simplest answer is the most accurate. I think you’ve got it.
Ponch8: One scenario that I could imagine being problematic: if there are several younger children and one older teenager, and the teenager is relegated to the kids’ table. Shit, even a couple years can make a huge difference in maturity levels. I’d be very pissed if I were the teenager in this scenario.
Yeah, and sometimes they try to soften it up by presenting it as “We need a mature person like you to be in charge of TKT!” Ever notice when adults compliment a child or teenager on how mature they are, it’s almost always because they want something? A favor, a sacrifice, or just to agree with them?
nightshadea: A country Karen, maybe. If she was raised fundy, especially if her parents were Quiverfulls (she would have been born before we had the term, but the idea is not new), she would have been brought up according to very strict, very narrow standards, by adults who were outnumbered by children, and therefore terrified of letting their guards down. I forget exactly what she claimed her mother would have said, but it was along the lines of “Quit bothering the grownups!” or “Leave the adults alone!”
But things have changed. Society has changed. Children seem to be more civilized because they’re around adults more; maybe there’s an upside to helicopter parenting after all. And being an adult is not as boring as it seemed it would be when I was a kid. These days, mamas do dance and daddies do rock and roll. (TM someone else.) So if grandma, or any other adult, had been irritated by these teenagers, I’m sure they had it in them to say “Enough; go inside,” if they’d thought it needed to be said. Apparently, they didn’t because they didn’t.
Yeah, at Christmas time, the kids in my family were the older cousins. The two other family cousins were at minimum two years younger. When you’re a kid that (plus more years) is a big difference. My younger sister was pissed because the way the sitting worked out, she ended up at the kids’ table where she was expected to be the babysitter. Crappy, but I never volunteered to switch places. The only other kids’ table meal we had regularly was with my dad’s old army buddy’s family every Thanksgiving. Four kids in each family pretty much the same ages. Those kids’ tables were a riot! So much fun!
This party doesn’t sound like much fun for any adults. Why didn’t the kids just party on their own?
Eh, I think everyone had a good time, except Ms. Thing. And you’ve made me think of something…
…The graduate probably did have other, non-adult-including, plans for after dark. When I graduated, that’s what most of us did. Had a late-afternoon meal/gathering with the family, at home or at a restaurant, then went someone’s house or wherever to do our thing unsupervised.
But the friend we have in common, who also heard this, did say, “Eh, think of Jeremy*. What kind of a party can he really have, DTC? [Due To Coronavirus]” And she’s right: large gatherings, like we had, are simply not happening now. Whatever he did in the evening probably involved a very small “bubble” of friends. And perhaps I’ve been too harsh on this woman. Maybe, pre-Corona, she was a party queen and went to a lot of large gatherings, and maybe what was eating her was “I’m reduced to a handful of people, almost half of whom can’t legally drink?!” She might still have had the “Minors, begone” mindset, but perhaps in 2019 or earlier, she would have thought, “It’s not my house; I’ll let it slide.” And very likely, in 2019 or earlier, there would have been more people at the backyard party, and the group would have naturally segregated itself.
*I think. I know it was a J name.
Exactly this.
But, issues of kids tables aside – this woman’s behavior is just batty. Who the hell goes into somebody else’s home and assumes a certain manner of behavior and custom should be observed, just because they just think it so? The notion of a kids’ table is irrelavant to me.
Since you asked, though, growing up we did have kids tables for family parties, weddings, christenings, etc., but those were generally for young kids (certainly under teenage years). But if a kid wanted to sit at the parents table, I can’t imagine anyone would object. It was more that the kids wanted to commiserate with one another.
We didn’t exactly have a “kids’ table”, it was more overflow seating since the dining room only sat eight or so. When all five cousins were there, as at holidays, there just wasn’t enough space for everyone.
Although an adult occasionally sat with us, mostly to be closer to the kitchen to replenish dishes more easily.
My parents always me to be at the table with them, not at some other table, so they never had a kids table for sit down meals. Just got out some leaves for the dining table, and used a card table or two to make the table even longer. We typically had 16-20 people around one table. Over the years we might have a much younger child who missed the meal due to a nap, and they would sit it the kitchen, also because the parents would be worried about spillage. My parents never allowed messiness to be a reason for banning someone from the dining table. Even then, there would be people in the kitchen and interacting with the child.
Picnics are a mix of tables, side tables and chairs, and everyone can choose what they like and change as needed, after the seniors are comfortable. This is how it always was at the big family gatherings with my grandparents, and also how much parents run picnics now.
In the situation in the OP, my parents would be absolutely baffled. If someone wants to move a chair outside, probably okay. They want people to enjoy themselves.
And if someone wants to sit and stew, they can probably find a suitable sitting space for that was well.
I never sat at a desginated kids table until I went to my boyfriend’s (now husband) house for Thanksgiving. It wasn’t really a kids table. It was the table for my husband, his two sisters and me. During the meal I had no chance to interact with his parents, aunt, uncle, grandmother, plus the cousins who sat at the table with their parents. That kids table was a symptom of a different problem.