Pretty ambitious sounding title but I am just going to give you one tip:

Abandon the notion of perfection!

Even if you do have the Martha gene – or the staff – to effortlessly attain the perfection portrayed in every holiday issue of every magazine you have been subjected to on the supermarket line, resist that urge. Why? Because your friends and family will secretly resent you for it. You are creating an unachievable goal for the rest of us to try to emulate. We don’t like that – at all. Petty? Yes, what can I tell you? We’re not perfect.

Should you actually achieve magazine cover perfection – either by accident or by ridiculous effort – just have the children scatter toys and the odd, preferably unwashed, sock around the living room before your guests arrive. This will instantly make the rest of us feel better, as well as providing us with fodder for the after event call to “Agnes”, the relative we call to dish with after family events. (Oh come on, you know we all do that.)

If you don’t have access to small children you might instead simply appear to have been imbibing all day – a dandy way to blemish your otherwise unnerving perfection as well as once again giving us something juicy to report. Of course if you don’t have small children you could actually become tipsy, but not enough to call into question the safety of eating the meal you have perfectly prepared. It’s all about your guests, after all.

Speaking of food – another good way of not being so perfect is to pretend to have burned the appetizers and offer the lowly chips and dip as the only available replacement. Many of us would prefer that to the grilled tofu and sardine ceviche anyway. It would also be nice if you could put on a little weight before the party – but then that may just be me asking too much.

So, relax. And, if you are fortunate to be a guest at a less at a less than perfect holiday event, don’t forget to call me when you get home. I’ll be all ears.