On Hosting Yourself

Weekend Reads v. 18.4.2026

Photo by Clay Banks for Unsplash

I’m writing to you from the other side of hosting family for Easter, a day spent leading 3 adults and 4 children through the urban wilds of DC, and enduring a seriously annoying sinus infection. Ah, Spring! But some much-needed downtime seems to be setting me right, so here I am back with you.

I very much enjoy hosting but seldom am able to do it. As they were preparing to depart, my sister, brother, and sister-in-law repeatedly remarked that my husband and I had been wonderful hosts. Because I’m me and ponder over just about anything, I wondered just what it is that categorizes someone as a good host.

While magazines and Pinterest will try to tell you the qualities of a good host are all found in a Williams-Sonoma catalog, I’m starting to think the basis of good hosting is knowing yourself.

A couple of years ago, my husband and I ventured out to Rehoboth Beach to visit a couple we are lucky to call friends. Let’s call them M and D, shall we? I would come to learn over the course of that weekend that M & D are masters in the art of hosting. At first I thought my experience was tied to our surroundings, a beautiful home located close to a bustling beach town. But after our second evening with our friends, I realized our visit was special because we felt taken care of. And we felt taken care of because they – M, specifically – had filtered every choice they made about the guest rooms through the lens of, “What would I like to have if I were visiting?”

The beds in this home are incredibly comfortable, and I think the comfort I felt was due to the fact that M thought about all the scenarios that might greet her guests. By stocking the bed with more than one style of pillow and offering several types of blankets, that bed could instantly conform to the side sleeper, or to the person who runs hot in the night, or to the person who sleeps best with a weighted blanket. The room also came with a sound machine, a place to put your stuff, and a bathroom freshly stocked with plush towels and toiletries. The experience felt like a weekend in a boutique hotel.

My friends are excellent hosts because they know what they like when they travel, and they then put themselves in the shoes of others when hosting. And this sorta supports my theory that the best hosts know themselves very well.

This means you and I can be excellent hosts without ever having someone over. We don’t need palatial homes and manicured back gardens to practice the art of hosting. No, I think we can start small by placing our favorite flower in a jam jar on the bathroom counter. We can upgrade our linens and towels so that we feel enveloped in comfort at the end of a long day. We can have a tissue box in every room or music playing with every meal or whatever personal comfort we might enjoy. And we can easily elevate the mundane. Bust out the tablecloth even if it’s just you eating the Thai takeaway. Use the wine glasses for your can of bubbly water. Whatever it is that makes you and me feel most at home – those are the things we can prioritize in our hosting. And whatever flourish feels special to us can be folded into an ordinary Wednesday dinner.

I suppose my logic here runs a bit parallel to the Golden Rule. To treat others as you’d like to be treated, you must first know how you’d like to be treated. Same goes for hosting as it helps to articulate how you’d like to be hosted before you start hosting others. Hopefully as we get to know ourselves better, we can anticipate and accommodate others with the grace and kindness that comes with being a good host. And for some of us, particularly my fellow people pleasers, flipping the Golden Rule might be in order. That is, we should aim to treat ourselves with the same kindness we extend to others.

The bonus content you didn’t know was coming. I served the Easter version of Caroline’s Cake classic caramel cake, and what a hit it was. I’d probably just do the regular caramel cake next time, tho.

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No one utters “fopdoodle” with their dignity impact…and 108 other goofy words brought to us by the English language.

Sometimes you just want data without all the noise, and that’s nearly impossible to find with most news outlets. I thought this website tracking the Strait of Hormuz was especially helpful, particularly in learning how countries around the world are impacted by changes in traffic through the tiny water pathway.

Speaking of data + maps, I’m still fascinated by the MarineTraffic map.

Intrigued by the Palmpress, a pour-over-meets-French Press from Corkcicle.

So, it’s not just me. Text on Instagram stories is often too small.

The secret to mobility in midlife and beyond might just be exercising this muscle.

A Hat Named Wanda is touted as a perfectly malleable hat, suitable for all sorts of people and occasions. I couldn’t say, seeing as I’ve never tried it on. I just love the name!

If you’re the extra patient type, creating a personal encyclopedia might be a great way to celebrate a special person in your life – say as a graduation gift or gift in honor of Mother’s Day or Father’s Day. It certainly takes a bit of effort, but the resulting personal wiki-style page is a pretty amazing way to document a person’s life.

Rob Henderson writes about the importance of keeping cool in this essay for the WSJ. “In moments of intense disagreement, you’re signaling what kind of person you are.”

9 Airbnbs that once belonged to people you may have heard of. Like, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jane Austen (!!).

Here’s the reason why you feel stressed when you look at your very full closet and struggle to decide what to wear.

This story about the scandal swirling around writer Amy Griffin and her maybe-not-so-accurate memoir was news to me, but whoa was it a good read.

Speaking of good reads, this essay about the chaos resulting from one roommate’s decision to take Ozempic hit home in a lot of ways. One, entire chapters of my life seem framed by what size I was wearing at the time, so the conversation about weight loss felt very personal. Two, the dynamic between roommates – particularly female roommates living in a large city – can be, well, delicate, and this piece articulated a lot of those dynamics with precision.

“It’s concealed in a brown paper bag in the wine fridge, if that tells you anything. Under rows of spiked seltzers, a few bottles of white wine and a way over budget bottle of champagne purchased for a birthday pregame, there it is. A crumpled brown paper bag with Walgreens splashed across the front, and inside is the medication my roommate’s been taking for approximately the last fourteen months. There’s a picture of her hiking tacked to the bulletin board in our apartment among a constellation of wedding and bridal and baby shower invites. In it she’s squinting against the sun, grinning. She looks like herself, happy and tan and taking the experience on the pulse. It’s from a trip she took with her twin sister, who has the same frame as her, who she’s been fighting with more lately, ever since she got skinny and then super-skinny.” (Source)

How can you prove your work wasn’t generated by AI and other depressing tales from the future?

How lovely are these illustrated cards?

Hard to believe this stunning resort is in the middle of Georgia. (The state, not the country)

First Chappywrap brought us incredibly chic flannel blankets, and now they bring us these beautiful needlepoint kits. Very on brand for them, I think. These might make a great Mother’s Day gift. Or, if you’re like my college roommate and me, they could be great for a graduate in your life. (EM, remember our Joni Mitchell and needlecraft nights in Patterson??)

In closing, have you seen Project Hail Mary yet? I just saw it in a theatre this week, and I must admit my expectations were quite low having seen at least four variations of the trailer. I assumed those trailers, like all movie trailers these days, had revealed the entire storyline. Oh how wrong I was! Delightfully wrong. It’s a movie that leaves you thinking. And of course while the movie is the result of that long process of optioning a book, the story deviates just a bit from the written word to accommodate the silver screen. If you haven’t seen it yet, it might be worth watching. This review of the movie captures so many thoughts I had and also shares insights from the book (which I have yet to read). Be warned, though, because spoilers abound in that review!

Spoil yourself a wee bit this weekend! I have a feeling you’ve earned it.