“A Ghost or Two Will Prove Invaluable”: Nancy Mitford’s Fabulously Unhinged Guide to Hosting a Country House Christmas

Never marry a Mitford, as the saying goes, but some of the sisters’ party advice? Golden. In the ’20s and ’30s, long before she published The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford contributed to British Vogue on a number of occasions—hardly surprising, given her close friendship with Cecil Beaton—but never more successfully than at Christmas, when she shared her thoughts on hosting a harmonious gathering at a country pile. Read her hilariously tongue-in-cheek guide to pulling off an acrimony-free party, below.

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Christmas is so essentially a time (or should I say, Yule is so essentially a tide?) which ought to be spent in the country, and is so proverbially horrible in London, that the lucky owners of large country houses feel, and rightly, that it is incumbent on them to fill said houses at such a tide (or time) with those of their friends and relations who would otherwise be fated to mope in towns.

Now, to most people, all entertaining is a pleasure. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that a Christmas party is more difficult to manage than any other sort of house party.

In the first place, there is the Olde Englishe tradition, impossible to break, that members of one family must spend the Yule Feast beneath the same roof/tree. This makes the invitations a perfect nightmare.

“Shall I ask the Golightlys?” says the hostess tentatively.

“Ask George and Edith, by all means,” replies her husband, “but remember, I won’t have that young cub Nigel in this house again.”

This washes out the Golightlys, who would never consent to be parted from their cherished only son at such a time.

“May I ask Maureen Parker and her mother?” enquires the young daughter of the house rather dubiously.

“Certainly not!” comes the stern reply. “I haven’t spoken to Norah Parker for 20 years, and I’m not going to begin now.”

In fact, before a Christmas party of any size can be gathered together, certain hatchets will have to be buried, if only for the duration of the peace and goodwill season. This in itself will not make the party any easier from the hostess’s point of view.

The ideal Christmas house party should be composed of four different elements: the Very Old, the Old, the Young, and the Very Young. The Very Old may be of any age not exceeding 100. They are an invaluable asset because of their looks, their entrancing and scandalous stories about the grandparents of their fellow guests, and because they, together with the great log fire in the hall, form a kind of rallying point for all generations. Besides this, there is a feeling of lifted restraint every time they leave the room, which acts like a tonic on the other guests.