fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2169 ]

[ SECRET POST #2169 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2169 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Okay, different question, but slightly related.

Whenever you celebrate something, whether it be a party, religious holiday, or some other celebration, do you open your house up to everyone, prepare a GINOURMOUS feast and invite everybody (your relatives, neighbors of different faiths and races, and basically everyone in a 20 house radius) to come and eat and talk?

Sincerely, South-East Asian who's been to a lot of "Open Houses" between friends, relatives, neighbors, and people of different faiths.

And thanks for replying to my first question everybody!

I'll answer this and try to be a bit more in depth. But again the answer is no. Except maybe when you are young and have a home alone party.

We send out invitations and keep a count on how many will show up. But we are a cold and heartless society who don't even know our neighbours names.

And I'm still Norwegian.

Darn, and here I was thinking you'd moved since your last comment! [Teasing, teasing...please don't shoot me ;A;]

Well I could have, I'm not that far from the Swedish border...

Edited (HTML fail) 2012-12-11 02:42 (UTC)

Really? Would you totally have ridden over on a dog sled?

[-coughs- Please feel free to tell me to screw off if I'm upsetting you with the teasing ^^;;]

'scuse me but we do use reindeer to travel! Or polar bears!

Pff, reindeer are *so* last century! Don't you know it's all about the dogs?

Shut up before I get on my longboat and conquer your country!

But how will you know the neighbourhood spirit of gotong-royong then?! And there's free food! Free! Food! ~~overdramatic sarcasm~~

The neighbourhood what? You don't know who your neighbours are, what if they turn out to be religious (one of the easiest way to make a Norwegian uncomfortable) or a murderer or republican! And they might pop over at your house when you don't want visitors! Seriously neighbours are scary and should be kept at arms length!

Free food is awesome though!

Norway is really starting to sound like my kind of place.

^ This.

yep

Wait a second, are you trying to tell us you're from Finland? Neat!

It depends? Some people do, some don't. Though most people don't generally decide if they're inviting someone based on gender/religion/race/sexuality [the exception being *maybe* religious holidays, and even then a lot of times people will be invited to celebrate it because they're close to the people giving the party].

The bigger factors on deciding it are usually how social the hosts are, how well they know the people in the area. For example, my family used to throw an annual party that would have over a hundred guests - including a lot of the neighborhood, because we knew most of the people there. Now that we've moved we've stopped inviting so many neighbors just because we don't know them very well [in fact, I can count the number I know by name on one hand], so they just don't get invited.

tl;dr: It depends on the host[s], but it can, and does, happen.

In the US, you really get everything. My family does huge gatherings, but not everyone does, and we really only invite family or super-close friends. My immediate family (grandparents and down) has over twenty people show up for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and my extended family (all descendents of my great-grandparents, all in all about eighty people) does a family reunion at a campground every year.

Sometimes, there are block parties or cook-outs, where one or two neighbors invite the whole neighborhood to their backyards, but those aren't as common as they used to be.

Same Californian-by-way-of-Florida anon from above:

It depends on the family and the neighborhood. For my immediate family, we tend to have decently large gatherings, but not invite neighbors we're not otherwise friends with, but friends from all over the city. So we'd have 50 people over for a graduation party, say, but everyone would have been specifically invited, rather than being open to random neighbors. My mom's super social, though, so in practice most of our neighbors were also on the invited friends list.

My family up in Montreal, when there's a celebration, seems to invite pretty much the entire Jewish community up there, but not necessarily neighbors in general, although there's a huge overlap, so it can be hard to tell.

I've once or twice been invited by random neighbors to some sort of open house party, but it's pretty rare. Most of the places I've lived since leaving for college haven't had much of a neighborhood atmosphere.

(USAican here) It really depends on who you are, personally, and also to some extent what region you're from, I'd imagine. Definitely 'open houses' like that are pretty uncommon in my experience (also they'd probably be called block parties, or cookouts, or barbeques, or something). My family doesn't usually do anything like that, we used to have pretty big family / family friend gatherings for Thanksgiving and such but not so much anymore. It'd probably help if we didn't live 3000 miles away from most of my extended family though.

From the USA:

Yeah, for personal celebrations we tend to have closed parties... but that just means that invitations are sent out and usually the favor of a reply is requested (meaning, the host wants to know if you're going to be there or not). My impression with the sort of open parties you are describing is that they happen in situations where everyone who is able to show up is expected to show up... wouldn't it be weird to you if your neighbors were obviously at home but not coming to your parties? Here in the US, that's seen as totally fine since we don't want to guilt our neighbors into coming if they really don't want to (and also, people tend not to be very close to their neighbors here... there are plenty of exceptions, of course, but that is the general trend).

For the graduations and weddings in my family, for instance, big parties like what you describe WERE thrown, and all relatives/important friends/close neighbors are invited. But it's never a given that people will show up, so we need to formally invite them and get formal acceptances/regrets in return.

We do have things called block parties, however, which are more like what you describe... but that depends entirely if the people on a certain street really get along and so most people don't experience them. A true block party is typically a free-for-all where everyone generally is invited but it's not formal, you can just show up, but the food and everything is also pot luck, meaning that everyone has to bring a share so it's not just one person bearing the burden of the expenses/effort to make it work. They can be really fun though! The ones I've experienced in my lifetime include the whole street being blocked off to traffic and everyone getting to play in the street. Lots of fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2169 ]

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Re: Stupid questions from non-natives (Part Seven)

Re: Stupid questions from non-natives (Part Seven)

Re: Stupid questions from non-natives (Part Seven)

Re: Stupid questions from non-natives (Part Seven)