The Open Sunday Dinner

I’ve started a thing the last couple of weeks, and that is the Open Sunday Dinner. It is, pretty much, exactly what it says on the tin. It’s an open dinner invite for my friends and family to drop by on Sunday for dinner. I cook something that’s easy to scale (last time it was curry, today it is a chili) and that keeps for a while without active effort, and everyone that feels like it drops by for dinner, to talk, hang out, and generally spend time in the lowest-pressure way I could come up with.

There is, intentionally, no ceremony or process around this. If I had to gave some “rules” around this, it would be something like this:

1. There’s no pressure to either come, or stay for a certain amount of time. If someone wants to show up, say hi, get a hug and a plate of food to eat in silence and then leave, that is explicitly fine.¹
2. The food is going to be made anyway, if someone flakes last minute because something comes up, they feel terrible, or they just don’t want to be seen by the outside world, they just… don’t show up. More leftovers for me means I have to cook less the rest of the week.
3. Similarly, there is no RSVP/notice required to show up. If someone has their plans fall through last minute, they are welcome to stop by.
4. Nobody has to bring anything except their sparkling company, this is not a potluck. You show up and food will be provided.

All of this mainly relies on my friends and family being close enough to have “showing up” be not a big deal to be planned around, but that is luckily the case for me. As with so many things, all of the explicitly low expectations usually lead to the opposite, people come and hang out during the afternoon, it goes into calendars for people to remember, people bring dessert or sides.

I’ve been having a great time doing this every other Sunday, and by the sounds of it, my attendees have been enjoying it as well. Maybe this is also something for you to do, if having people around Sunday afternoon sounds nice.