Martha Stewart, the queen of hospitality, has issued a retraction of her recent declaration on The Kelly Clarkson Show that she had “cancelled Thanksgiving” this year. In the US, it seems to have been an event as apocalypse-adjacent as the ravens leaving the Tower of London, causing widespread panic.
Her retraction, issued via a lengthy Instagram statement, was preposterously, wonderfully grand. I love every syllable. She did not cancel Thanksgiving, she wrote; she called off her own party “due to guest cancellations”. (I don’t know how this phrase manages to convey Arctic-level frosty disapproval at flaking on her in so few innocuous words, but it does.)
Anyway, she would still be celebrating Thanksgiving, she protested. She “promised to bring a stuffed and roasted 20-pound organic, heritage bird” to a friend’s buffet! She would be baking 30 pies! She would be “staying home for two days to plant 75 new peonies” and “move dozens of hostas”. Someone called Kevin Sharkey would be coming to “horseback ride and eat”. Making masterly use of the passive, she wrote that “burlap coats are being made” to keep her boxwood shrubs warm. She signed off with a regally expressed wish for “an improvement in our world’s affairs”. Magnificent.
With this statement, Stewart has given the world a greater gift than even one of her cranberry pies: a set of God-tier excuses for not going somewhere. The best one of all was that a “colossal chocolate turkey”, which she crafted in October using her “giant antique turkey mold”, had crumbled and she was being forced to melt the chocolate into her pecan pies. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
At this time of year, my problem is more not being invited to things, the natural consequence of being sourly, stubbornly antisocial the rest of the time. I don’t usually notice, but, in December, I sometimes find myself fleece-clad on the sofa, face pressed to my phone, glumly swiping through pictures of friends and acquaintances doing sparkly things in enviable places.
Stewart’s statement offers an elegant swerve for that particular form of social death, too. If I am asked why I wasn’t at some glamorous gathering, I will concoct something involving a crumbled chocolate turkey, a mountain of hostas to be propagated and a profusion of peonies. No party can compete with that.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
