The Good Dishes and a Cat Who Walks the Table: Hosting Dinner with Pets

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The first holiday dinner I hosted in this house, Mabel walked the full length of the table before anyone had sat down. She did it slowly, the way she does everything she knows she is not supposed to do, stepping neatly between the glasses and pausing at the end to look back at me. Rowan, meanwhile, had positioned himself under the table at exactly the height where a sixty-pound shepherd mix’s tail clears every chair leg and hits every shin.

Nothing broke that night. That was luck, not planning. This post is about the planning I have done since, because I like having people over, I like setting a nice table, and I am not willing to give up either of those things to the animals.

Why the table is the hardest room in the house

I have written about the sofa, the floors and the hallway. All of those are problems you solve once. The dinner table is different, because it changes. Most of the year it holds a laptop and a stack of mail. A few times a year it suddenly holds everything breakable and delicious I own, at cat height, for several hours.

From Mabel’s point of view, that is not a dinner. That is a new landscape that appeared overnight, full of interesting smells, with nobody guarding it.

What I do now when people are coming

Set the table last

My instinct used to be to set the table in the afternoon so it would be ready. Now it is the very last thing before people arrive. Every hour a set table sits there is an hour for a cat to investigate it.

Close a door for the first hour

Mabel spends the arrival and the first course in the bedroom with her bed, water and litter box. It is not a punishment. Arrivals are loud and the door opens and closes a lot, and she is happier away from it. She comes out once everyone is settled and the food is mostly on plates.

Give the dog a job

Rowan does better with a place to be than with being told where not to be. His bed goes in the corner of the dining room with a chew, and he gets praised for staying there. The tail stays out of range.

Nothing fragile at the edges

Candles in the middle, never at the ends. Serving dishes away from the edge. Glasses on the inside of the plate, not the outside. It sounds fussy, but it is the difference between a tail sweep that hits a chair and one that clears a table.

Know what not to share

Guests love to slip the dog something. Plenty of holiday food is not good for animals, and some of it is genuinely dangerous. I tell guests once, kindly, that nobody feeds the dog, and if you are unsure whether something your pet ate is a problem, call your vet rather than searching for an answer.

Keeping the good dishes for the good nights

For years I did not own anything nice to put on the table, partly because of the animals. I had a set of thick, chipped plates that could survive a fall to the kitchen floor, and that was what guests got.

I changed my mind about that. The plates are not what is at risk. What is at risk is the hour or two when they are out on the table, and that is a problem I can manage. The rest of the year, good dishes can live somewhere the cat cannot reach: a closed cabinet, a high shelf behind a door, not an open display rack she can walk along.

A set I came across

While looking for something to bring out on those nights, I came across the Erika dinner set from the Gourmet Gift Basket Store. It is a fine porcelain set made by Hollóháza, a classic white pattern with a green border, the kind of thing that makes a holiday table feel like an occasion. If you are hosting this season, or looking for a gift for someone who is, the banner below goes straight to it.

If you have pets and are thinking about nice tableware, ask yourself the boring question first: where will it live the rest of the year? If the answer is somewhere a cat can walk past, sort that out before anything else.

The dinner, not the damage

Last December I hosted six people. Mabel came out of the bedroom around eight, sat on the window ledge and watched the whole thing like a member of the jury. Rowan stayed on his bed for most of the meal and got a lot of attention for it. Nothing broke, and this time it was not luck.

Having animals does not mean giving up the nice table. It means setting it later, guarding it a bit, and putting it away properly afterward. If you want something special to bring out this season, you can see the Erika porcelain dinner set here. Then close a door for the first hour.

Photos: Beyzaa Yurtkuran and RDNE Stock project via Pexels.