Fifthly, use this period to strengthen the consciousness of family unity by recounting past happy experiences and discussing plans of family life.  In one family there are few meals from October to Christmas that do not include reminiscences of the summer in the woods and by the water, or from Christmas to June without plans for the next summer in the same place.  Then, too, if you are contemplating something new, a piano, a chair, an automobile, talk it all over here.  Let each one have his share in the planning.  The effect is most important for character; the children acquire the sense of a share in the family community life.  They get their first lessons in citizenship in this group, and they thus learn social living.  Then when the chair, or what not, is bought, it is not alone the parents’ possession; it belongs to all and all treat it as the property of all.

Sixthly, introduce great guests who cannot come in person.  It is fine fun to say, “We have with us tonight a man who loved bees and wrote books.”  Let them guess who it was; help, if necessary, by an allusion to The Life of the Bee and The Blue Bird.  They will want to know more about Maeterlinck and they will joyously imagine what they would say to him and how he would answer, what he would eat and how he would behave.  In this way we may enjoy knowing better Lincoln, Whittier, Florence Nightingale, and an innumerable company.

Seventhly, this is the place to remind ourselves that table-manners are no small part of the moral life.  By the habituation of custom we can establish lives in attitudes of everyday thoughtfulness for others, in the underlying consideration of others which is the basis of all courtesy.  Children’s questions on table-etiquette must be met, not only by the formal rules, but also by their explanation in the intent of every gentle life to give pleasure and not pain to others, so to live in all things as to find helpful harmony with other lives and to help them to find and be the best.  It is not only impolite to grab and guzzle, it is unsocial and so unmoral, because it is both a bad example and a distressing sight to others.  It is irreligious, because whatever tends to make this life less beautiful must be offensive to the God who made all things good.

If we ourselves seek to maintain beauty, order, and kindliness in the conduct of the table, our children acquire a love of all that makes for beauty and order and kindliness, for righteousness in the little things of life.  A clean tablecloth may be a means of grace.  You have to try to live up to it.  Order and quietness in eating are not separable from the rest of the life.  To lift up life at any point is to raise the whole level.  To let it down at any point is to let all down.  But to lift up the level of conversation at the table is to raise the level of the entire occasion and to make it more than a period of eating, to convert it into a festival, a joyous occasion of the spirit.  The meal should be in all things worthy of the unseen guest.