Here my sisters and cousins are just settling in for Christmas dinner at the children’s table. At our family holiday dinners, there would be a card table set up in the corner to accommodate the overflow from the dining room table where the grown-ups were seated. By 1967, I had graduated to the “adult table.” A dubious honor. There were more eyes on you at the adult table and higher expectations around etiquette.You had to politely answer repeated questions about what you were doing in school (which, I guarantee, was not the topic of conversation at the kids’ table). You couldn’t scrape the parts of the meal you didn’t want to eat into one of those big paper Santa napkins quite so easily and it took longer to get permission to be excused. Maturity came at a price.
The Children’s Table, 1967
