When my husband turned fifty this summer, we celebrated with a large family dinner followed by a cocktail and cake party for ninety friends. The festivities included vats of hot oil, a communal dredging station, copious amounts of fried catfish, Timm's signature tartar sauce, a signature cocktail, five cakes, tons of music and mingling, words of affirmation, and secret hopes for a killer after-party.
Our home was teaming with people, a beautiful mess of snacks and cocktails, warm with the presence of so many bodies on a hot summer evening, loud with conversation, and overflowing with love for Timm as we all celebrated together. This is how my husband wanted to be celebrated, and everything about it, including the timing, scale, and scope, reflected his personality and values. The vibe was very Timm.
Suffice it to say the scene I helped create on that hot July evening did not represent me. I'm the introvert to Timm's extrovert, the single-serve to his mass-quantity, the quiet to his loud, the soft to his rugged, the slow to his fast. We are a well-matched pair of opposites, and when it comes time to celebrate, the events usually reflect these differences.
This is exactly as it should be.
I believe that a celebrations should align with the desires of the person being celebrated, regardless of how different those desires may be from the person hosting the party. The event is, after all, solely about the celebrated person, no one else. To insert ourselves as host into the choices of the honoree is to make the party about us instead of allowing it to reflect the ethos of the other person. And a party that reflects the honoree is always memorable, reflective, knowing, and special.
Would I have celebrated my birthday with fried fish and a hundred people? No way! But my wishes, while valid in their own right, held no bearing on the party I hosted for my fun-loving, gregarious husband. As host, my role was to ask what he wanted, provide feedback, and then execute his vision. How I felt about Timm's choices or desires or values was not the point of the evening. The point was to deliver to him the celebration he wanted and to keep my preferences out of the picture.
Our role in celebrating others is to bring our time, talents, and creativity to the setting while simultaneously keeping our wishes and wants out of the picture. It is about learning to show up as our whole self without making the event about ourself. This is tricky to get right, especially because as we all know, opposites attract. But if the point of the celebration is to honor another, then the gift we give is to do so with grace and space for everything their heart desires.
