Fortunately, I can’t remember having any major holiday entertaining disasters. I avoid those by greeting guests with a well-stocked wine table and lots of snacks all over the room.

(This advice is golden, folks.)

However, disasters in the social sense? Disasters ending in general embarrassment?
We only have to look back to the early nineties for those.

Christmas break, 1992. My friend Lizzie and I were bored beyond end. After slowly walking around the local convenience store looking at lipstick for an hour, we found a home permanent kit in the sale aisle.

Bingo, boredom abated.

My hair that decade was a thing of beauty. Chestnut brown, hanging to the middle of my back, thick and lovely, why anyone would want to mess with it, well, I would.

After we got home, Lizzie and my sister got to work, rolling and rolling and rolling all that gorgeous hair onto the tiny perm rods. Next, they mixed — PU! — the solution. Finally, there was dousing. Lots and lots of dousing.

The smell of home permanent solution is specific indeed. Acrid, burning, yet there’s something sweet about it completely unlike my precious wine — where the only scent waffles between blackberry and boysenberry.

Anyway — home perm. We decided to leave it on twice as long due to the length and density of my locks. Can you see where this is going?

When the time came to remove the rods, I immediately felt a difference. The texture of my hair… was this the curly look I was after? We rinsed and rinsed and gelled an moussed and blew dry and all three of us were silent. Large stringy patches of frizz stuck out 90 ° from my head. Fried and coarse, dry and yet the same texture as an SOS pad.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad, I thought and rallied the girls to attend a basketball game that night. As I walked into the stands, shouts of “What’s that smell?” rang out after me. In disaster recover mode, I went to the car and found a knit hat, sprayed it with glove box perfume (also, something I only kept in that compartment during high school) and I wore a perfumed knit hat the entire night.

Which only left me smelling like permanent solution doused in CKOne.

Sigh.

Outdoor tables become crusty with dirt, rainwater, sprinkler residue. Although each summer, I scrub the table down as part of my weekly cleaning routine, I still want to make sure my guests aren’t eating off a funky dusty table.

Enter the oilcloth tablecloth.

Three major benefits follow,
One is the easy to wipe down-ness of the oilcloth.
Two is the cost and durability.
Three is the fact that you can cut it yourself!

I love to order oilcloth from any online retailer to size. See, my 10 foot picnic table is tough to dress in the average tablecloth sizes.

You can find chalkboard oilcloth, floral oilcloth, even checked. And it all looks styley.

In measuring, you want to remember that the tablecloth should drape at least eight inches down from the table’s edge. Longer, it will plop in your guests’ laps, shorter, and it won’t cover the table completely.

Hose or wipe the tablecloth down when you’re done and maintenance is simple.