Fuck it, have a fauxliday

Embrace the just-because célèbre.

This is Cocktail Charm, a weekly email filled with delicious little things to talk about at parties. In today’s edition: stage moms, donut droughts, and 2,000 collectible dolls.

Let’s start this edition with how you can be a neighbor to those affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. Here’s a list of needs from Mutual Aid LA and suggestions from the LA Times.

Slim Aarons, “Party in Acapulco,” 1966

Last Friday afternoon, my phone buzzed with a notification. It was my brother’s partner

Liam Wiesenberger

, and he’d text-blasted me an invitation. The date: the following morning. The occasion: an impromptu polar plunge. He’d been inspired by Katherine May’s Wintering, he wrote. Instead of running away from the cold, he wanted to embrace it. And he felt strongly enough about this splash from Brooklyn coastal waters that he’d turned it into a party.

For a few years now, we’ve talked about an epidemic of loneliness. In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared it a public health epidemic. The UK and Japan both appointed public officials for loneliness; among the United Nations, at least 14 countries have national programs that address social isolation. But as of late, it feels like concern around our solitude has picked up the pace. Last week The Atlantic published a cover story laying out how Americans of all ages are spending less time together than ever before. “People feel they don’t owe anyone anything,” quotes The Guardian in a different story, this one about the rise in flaking out on social plans. “How Far Would You Go to Make a Friend?,” New York Magazine asks in a new feature about the startups shilling programs and pilgrimages to cure one’s loneliness.

I’ve been feeling this in my own life. Two or so years ago, I moved cities and took a demanding job that drained the joy from my body each day; every evening, dried-out and slack-shouldered, I’d slump home, speak to nobody, try to sleep. In time, I had to confront how lonely it had made me: I hadn’t met many new people in New York, nor kept up with old friends from DC.

Rebuilding my relationships is still a work in progress. But as I do that work, I’ve leaned into one tactic that always reinvigorates my sense of connection. It’s a shot in the arm for my social life, one that gives me a jolt of joie de vivre like nothing else really can.

The move: putting together a party, a festivity, or a celebration for no reason at all. Call it the fauxliday.

I love parties. I love hosting people in my home, I love following a silly theme, I love deploying elaborate games or shticks. When Jacob and I signed our domestic partnership papers, we hosted a romance-themed scavenger hunt on the town. When I discovered my apartment had access to a roof, I told everyone to come see it wearing disco garb. There’s something deliciously frivolous about ad-libbing an occasion for occasion’s sake, about erecting and enforcing arbitrary rules for a day, about gathering and celebrating just because we say so. Why wait for a birthday or anniversary to give you the excuse? Make up a party; make up a fauxliday.

The fauxliday is a holiday of indulgent self-construction. It’s an invented fête, a just-because célèbre. The fauxliday insists we get together grandly and gratuitously, and only when there’s nothing on the calendar to justify it. The fauxliday says, “I appreciate having you in my life, and I’m going to devise an absolutely deranged affair to show it.” The fauxliday says “I’m inviting you to run around the city in costume;” it says, “I’m inviting you to toast my pet iguana’s baptism;” it says “I’m inviting you to jump into freezing New York channels just because I am sad lately and I decided to!”

Turn the tables

Last week, I got an invitation from a friend I haven’t seen in too long. “It’s the coldest month of the year, which means it’s time to heat things up,” she wrote. She was throwing a summer-in-winter-themed karaoke party, anchored by a setlist dredged in vitamin D. It was a perfect occasion for a fauxliday, which is to say no occasion at all. By the time I opened the invite, a few dozen people had already said yes.

It had me thinking about Pancake Day, a fauxliday started up by San Francisco resident Curtis Kimball to meet people in his neighborhood.

“My wife says I’m getting weird,” Kimball typed on sheets of paper, which he then taped to telephone poles around Bernal Heights. “She says I need to make friends. So I’m making pancakes.”

What began with a flyer ended as a hundred people lined up in his driveway to grab a plate. “Even if you don’t like to eat pancakes, you just like the idea of them,” he told The Washington Post in 2022. “Being around pancakes feels good, even if you’re not eating them yourself.”

In praise of the just-because party

There are actually plenty of reasons for these no-reason parties: beat back seasonal malaise, forge flour-dusted relationships with your neighbors, shock oneself into appreciating spontaneity again. The real appeal of the fauxliday is that it does fill a necessary space, even if the calendar doesn’t say so — to make the get-together the point, not whatever you’re getting together for.

This weekend, I invited people to a fauxliday of my own: a Galentine’s brunch, which I’ve been holding just about every year since 2017. The reason I do it, besides the excuse to make my favorite French toast casserole? Ostensibly, it’s to introduce women I love and admire to other women I love and admire. But secondarily, it’s to maybe, hopefully, get invited to a just-because party of their own.

Pick up your planner. Embrace the fauxliday.

Now I have to ask: Which invented holiday are you going to make happen? Hit reply and let me know.

Tell me about it

Conversation-starters to take to happy hour, your group chat, or your next fauxliday brunch.

What’ll happen to the culture when TikTok powers down? ICYMI, last week’s hearing with the Supreme Court didn’t go well. But Bloomberg asks a good question about the trend machine.

What happens on TikTok doesn’t stay there. Instead the app has become something of an assignment editor for the internet at large, pushing the ideas of TikTok creators—girl dinner, everything shower, quiet luxury—out into traditional media and onto other platforms, as well as into the marketing plans for all kinds of products.

…If TikTok falls, where will the trends sprout from?

Twitter’s been diminished to an Elon-simping swamp, Instagram’s been critiqued for pushing too much aspiration, and Snapchat’s been all but boarded-up for a decade. Some users are hopscotching over to another Chinese app called Red Note in hopes it could replace what TikTok offered. Will that one stick? I don’t know about that. Unfortunately, it’s probably Mark Zuckerberg’s internet now.

Meanwhile, could news orgs learn credibility from…creators? I really enjoyed this interview with The Markup’s Julia Angwin, who spent the last year studying how journalism can rebuild public trust.

Is Annie really worth all this? A great featurette about the modern state of stage momming.

How are you handling the great American donut shortage? Blessedly, Krispy Kreme is not affected.

Will Bump-its be coming back this year???? A critical red carpet investigation.

One freak fact I’m telling everyone over drinks

Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff of Aspen in 1970 with a platform of renaming the ski town Fat City. The campaign promised it would keep “greed heads, land-rapers and other human jackals from capitalizing on the name.”

One question I’m asking anyone I meet this week

Who’s using books to cure your seasonal depression? Bibliotherapy sounds like a concept I’d get on board with, but when your counselor is billing themselves as a “library curator,” words have officially been emptied of their meaning.

One thing that made me regret not talking up the Golden Globes more

The chyrons were an artistic triumph, and Demi Moore was their muse.

Last chatter

God, I’m exhausted. Enjoy this errant Globe fact and think about whether you’d like to have a namesake asteroid. Can I get a small moon?

Clink clink!
Gabriela

Thanks for being a reader of Cocktail Charm! Has this newsletter helped you out at happy hour? Let me know; I’d love to hear it.