Miss Manners: Can I plan ahead for leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner with my daughter’s in-laws?

[ermingarden]

Dear Miss Manners: I'm invited to Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws of my daughter. Is it rude to take my own to-go container to bring home leftovers?

And a burlap bag in which to take home the silverware when they are finished using it?

Comments

[rmc28]

If I want to send leftovers home with people I will either provide the to-go containers myself, or explicitly ask them in advance to bring them along. I think it's entirely plausible that LW comes from a family culture of people getting sent home with leftovers: in my family it's not necessarily a given, but it quite often happens after big family gatherings, especially if the hosts have laid on food to the tastes of their guests that is less to their own taste. Usually though we're (re)using cleaned takeaway boxes to pack up the leftovers so handing some off to departing guests is easy enough.

I could totally imagine some of my relatives throwing a party and adding "bring a reusable box to take away any leftovers, we don't want food waste here". It's the step to assuming one should do so without any explicit mention of the idea that seems a bit much. But maybe that's how LW's family does it.

[jadelennox]

We always send people home with leftovers from thanksgiving, but we wrap up the food in clean takeout containers.

[azurelunatic]

I personally don't always know until the aftermath whether all the leftovers will fit in the refrigerator or not, never mind whether we'll want to go through that quantity of things. Then at that point I would probably announce that there will be leftovers departing and start the search for appropriate vessels (usually washed takeout containers, yup). I agree that it's best for a guest to leave a personal leftovers container unrevealed unless/until the host makes the announcement.

[azurelunatic]

Due to storage space issues and ADHD realities, we tend to limit the number of reusable takeout containers that are just sitting around in the kitchen (vs being used to store craft supplies). So it's entirely likely that we'd send things off in plastic zippy bags instead of being able to locate a spare hard-sided container.