On a tablecloth

I have a lot of childhood memories of having formal dinners at our house. I would have to put a leaf in the middle of the dining room to make it bigger. Then I'd help my mother spread the tablecloth over it, and she'd lay out the nice china and the good silverware. She'd cook a lot of different dishes of food and set them out on the nearby serving table for people to walk by and pick out the food they wanted and put it on their plates. Often turkey, since this could be Thanksgiving, or roast beef or a sliced ham.

On invitations

Do people still ever have big dinner parties, and also weekend parties where they put their guests up in the bedrooms? Did those things only exist in old British novels? You set up such parties, send out invitations, and all your friends show up ready for you to show them a good time for an entire weekend? Though, of course, there was bound to be a ghost, or at least a good murder or two. Unless the novel was written by P.G. Wodehouse, in which case Jeeves would make sure that some young man won the heart of some young woman and escaped from whatever terrible predicament he got caught up in.