Our year of Saturday dinners

Reporting back on our 2025 resolution

Dec 19, 2025

Around this time last year, my husband decided we’d make a 2025 resolution:

Every Saturday we were in town, we’d host people for dinner.

I wrote about it in January:

Everyone's lonely but no one can hang out

And gave an update in July:

How our weekly dinners are going

With the end of the year upon us, some reflection — in the form of a Q&A...

Q: So, how’s the dinner thing going?

Great. We did it! We really did host people basically every Saturday in 2025. (With two weekends left to go, we’re booked up.)

There were a few exceptions: We did dinner on Sundays a few times because of holidays or travel, and a few meals or parties were at other people’s homes when we were invited — but if the goal of the resolution was “be proactive and aggressive in order to rebuild community and expand our social life,” then we kept to the spirit of it, 100%.

Q: Was it different people every time? How many people in one night? How did the invites work?

It was different people most times, but there were obviously repeats. (We don’t know that many people.)

Per my husband’s rigorous spreadsheet, with 50 meals done (and two to go), we’ve had 141 adults and 80 kids over to our home this year — if you disregard repeats, it was 78 unique individual adults and 40 unique kids.

They included our neighbors, close friends, colleagues of both mine and my husband’s, people from daycare, people from my big kid’s new school, old friends from college, and more.

Our smallest dinner was just us plus one guest; our biggest was 15 people to eat pork rolls, disco fries, and salt water taffy in a themed meal celebrating my husband’s New Jersey heritage.

More stats, if you care: The average number of people over for dinner in addition to our family was 4.5. Alternatively, we’d average 3 adults and 1.7 children. (Roll with the portions.)

As I described before: We just made a list of everyone we’d want to have over for dinner, then texted out invites. We tried to schedule 4-6 weeks out.

Invites were simple:

“Hey! We’ve got a New Years Resolution to host dinner every Saturday in 2025. Help us keep the streak alive? Free to come over X Y or Z day at 5pm? BYOB.”

If folks couldn’t make one of those dates, we’d move further down the calendar.

The week of the dinner, I’d send confirmation texts and confirm dietary restrictions so my husband could plan the menu.

Q: What’d you eat? When did you cook?

Our menus are here. Guests would be asked to BYOB; occasionally someone might bring something but we never required them to make food.

My husband got into a pretty good rhythm of cooking or prepping some stuff Thursday or Friday night after the kids went to bed; the rest he’d do during naptime (1-3ish) on Saturday before folks came over at 5pm.

Most of the kids who came over were 5 or under; they all got their own plates of fruit, cheese, crackers, and other standard fare for toddlers and pre-schoolers. Some kids would want whatever the grown-ups were eating; some wouldn’t, but we made sure everyone had something.

Q: Do you have a big dining room table? Where do all of you sit?

We do not! Our kitchen table seats 4 comfortably, we can squeeze six if we need, but honestly we only have five adult chairs, plus the high chair for the baby.

In the warmer months, we were able to eat on our deck where our table could fit six adults, and kids would eat nearby on the coffee table and then go right inside the door to play. The summer meals were particularly magical once we figured out this set-up.

Q: Was this expensive?

Well, the cost of groceries has gone up in America. But as a family we needed to eat anyway, and it was certainly cheaper than going out to eat (especially if we needed a babysitter) and way less stressful with the kids.

Q: Did it really have to be every week?

We found that having the consistency meant it was very easy to invite people. We could just toss out three or four upcoming Saturdays, and if none of those worked, we’d move down the calendar.

Q: What if people cancelled? What if someone got sick?

This is where we got a little obsessive — we had a few weeks throughout the year where people would cancel last-ish minute and instead of just calling it and letting the week go by without a meal, we scrambled to send out last minute invites and find someone else to join us. We couldn’t let the streak die!

Q: How bad was the prep and the clean up?

Not bad at all. The secret is minimum viable cleanliness. My job was to prep the apartment and I lowered the bar dramatically. Clean bathroom, clean floors, clean tables — everything else was negotiable.

Q: How do you feel now that 2025 is nearly over? Did the resolution work?

Without hesitation or reservation: Yes. Our social circle expanded dramatically. We actually made new friends!

Q: So what are you going to do in 2026?

We are going to try and keep it going into the new year. (We’re already booked a few weekends of January and February.)

Q: Any advice for someone who wants to do something similar in 2026?

Just do it. It might be chaos. Something will go wrong. You might have a bad (or less perfect) night once in a while. That you know there’ll be another dinner six days later relieves any single night from carrying the burden of being the best night ever. Operate from a place of abundance: We get to have lots of best nights.