The music’s dying down.
People are beginning to trickle out the door with their “I’ve got work tomorrow” and “I have a long drive home” excuses.
The uncles – with their big ol’ beer bellies – loosen up their belts to allow room for just one more helping of mac and cheese.
And then there’s the dining room table, cluttered with aluminum trays of half-eaten black rice, lasagna, fried chicken, and that one bowl of crap your aunt made that’s still filled to the brim because don’t nobody want to eat somethin’ that looks chewed up and spat out again.
All the mothers are eyeing the table with avaricious desire. Here lies food that could feed a whole family for a week. How, they wonder, could they approach the host to sneak off with some — actually most — of the food so they can take a much needed break from sweating in the kitchen?
While everyone else is trying to figure out how to grab some leftovers for the road – save for that one bowl of crap my aunt made – I watched my mother whip out about three bowls of Tupperware and ask if she could fill ‘em up.
I was mortified!
I could feel the heat burn up in my cheeks and my eyes water in embarrassment. “She did not just do that!”
But oh, she did. To my dismay, she very much did.
The host shrugged as if to say “knock yourself out,” handed her a big spoon, and my mother went to work – some lasagna for Monday, some rice and beans for Tuesday, fried chicken and potatoes for Wednesday, and lastly, some of that mush my aunt made so as to not offend her, but that crap went straight into the trash the moment we got home.
When we got in the car, I whined to my mother for daring to bring Tupperware to the party, but my words rolled right off my her shoulders. “She’s family! She doesn’t mind.”
I explained to mother that she may have pretended it didn’t bother her, but that doesn’t mean that, in the far corners of the host’s mind, she wasn’t thinking about how tacky my mother was being.
“If anything,” my mother said, “I was being thoughtful and considerate in getting all that food off her hands! And I brought my own plastic containers so they don’t have to part ways with theirs.”
My mom recalled a time she went to a previous party and the host told her she didn’t have foil or Tupperware to give her to take home some food, so this time, she came “prepared!”
“Of course she had a bowl or two! She just didn’t want to give you any food!” I said.
But there was no reasoning with my mother. She saw herself as some sort of Tupperware hero, going from party to party, stacking up containers of food to save the hosts from the perils of overflowing refrigerators and spoilage from leftovers.
“If they were not family, I’d see your point,” my mother said. “But that’s blood. They don’t mind.”
What do you guys think? Is it tacky to bring Tupperware to a party?
Kimberly Gedeon, founder of The Melody of Melanin, is a content creator with nearly 2,000 professional articles published online about everything from beauty and business to politics and pop culture. You can say hello to her on Instagram or Twitter – she doesn’t bite … much!
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