Assess your table. With food, candles and a bottle of wine how many people can comfortably sit there? Are you serving your dinner family style? In which case you're going to need extra room for the dishes of food. However, I find bringing plated meals from the kitchen can be less awkward for guests than fumbling with serving dishes and quantities. Remember though in each case the challenges of keeping the food hot.

We've all had the mad rush of cooking and cleaning to make everything just right for our guests. Clean towels in the powder room, polished wood floors, vacuumed carpets, sparkling windows…. I have a friend who even gets down and scrubs the baseboards before company comes over.

In this day and age, with many of us adopting side gigs for extra income we wonder how anyone has the time to host people for dinner with all the work involved. But it's important to recognize that all this effort is not a “waste” of time, it's part of our emotional health.