Sometimes amusing themes are thrown up by Zen. So he threw me an indignant article from a person who bought a gift, and, sitting at the festive table, could not "beat it off". I would use a different term - "eat off", but it sounds very funny.
And the person in bewilderment asks the question: do such "hosts of the holiday" have a conscience, gifts were given to them, and they saved on the table, y, mercantile!
I read this and smiled. In my life, I faced this only once, in a distant student body. We had a couple - they found each other, a boy and a girl. So they, getting ready for their birthday, carefully calculated how much the owner, in theory, would spend on the table, how much they could use, and based on this they bought a gift.
You understand, the tables in the students did not shine with luxury, since there is a drink, and there is a snack on the sleeve (in the extreme the case of "Invite" we will write it down), so someone, having heard or learned about the calculations, told the guys - yes, I don't need your gifts, I so I call.
The funny thing is, the guys were normal in life, but there was a fad with the food-gifts correlation. Maybe in families it was customary?
By the way, they continued to carry gifts, they didn’t come without gifts either. A kind of nobility, hmm ...
True, when he got older, he knew people who prepared a festive table for the amount that they "planned to help out from gifts."
Why am I writing all this?
The traditions of Russian hospitality are rooted in the depths of centuries. Food - its quantity, its presentation, decoration - once meant not only a demonstration of respect for guests, but also a demonstration of the wealth of the hosts. These functions are still carried by holiday tables, no matter how we try to pretend that we do not suspect anything about them.
You can prove as much as you like that tartlets with black caviar on the festive table are "exclusively for ourselves", but if we do not we will allow ourselves to use it on an ordinary day, and we will expose it only when guests come, this is the very desire to demonstrate wealth.
A bit of a deceiving demonstration, but the fact remains.
When a person chooses a gift, then, by the way, this also demonstrates his wealth (and also tries to exaggerate in the eyes of others, which is why gifts that look more expensive than they actually cost are so popular business).
On the one and the other hand, such movements are purely voluntary.
And it’s very funny when on the same “site” those who want to eat “how much they got it” collide with those who who wants to feed "how much they gave", and both of them tend to seem cooler than they are.
Collided?