I am extremely sorry for having touted the glories of eggnog on Friday, because I felt compelled over the weekend to sample my own wisdom, and I now feel (and probably look) like an alcoholic Winnie-the-Pooh. And, after four parties in two and a half days, playing consultant on Form and Guest Lists to a variety of people, I’ve gained new appreciation for Pooh’s tendency to drop off for a nap at random intervals.

The tendency to cram an entire year’s worth of entertaining into one month has become tiresome, to say the least. Have I missed some heavenly decree forbidding Saturday afternoon cocktail parties in March (when God knows we need something to perk up a dreary afternoon) and October tailgate parties?

In most cities, there was once a “social season” that contained the year’s formal entertaining. You might have summer parties, but always informal. Formality in the summer is to be frowned on for two main reasons: it’s Just Not Done and, to paraphrase Tom Robbins, no one wants to be swaddled in evening clothes in a city whose climate resembles nothing so much as the inside of a napalmed watermelon. “Social season” was the time when you absolutely had to be back in town; men dusted off their evening clothes (and prayed they could still fit into them). Women descended on the department stores and sent to Europe for the latest fashions. The Season had a different opening day in every city. In New York, I believe, the official rule was that the Season opened with the first night of the new season of the Opera. Richmond doesn’t seem to have been too particular, as long as people started having formal parties in November sometime. Baltimore tried to gauge things by the Monday German or the Bachelor’s Cotillion. Whenever you got it started, Social Season always had a hidebound and unforgiving termination on Ash Wednesday.

Naturally, very few people have the time and inclination to really throw a large formal party anymore. We just don’t have the time — or the domestic servants — to pull off twelve-course dinners for eighteen people. Neither do most people have the money to arrange for the Belvedere’s ballroom and a little salon orchestra for six hours. Still, it’s sad to see the once-glittering Season pared down to four frantic weeks in December.

Is it our ever-increasing obsession with Christmas decorations and showing them off that has led us to eschew January and February entertaining? Or just that, in a time when almost all adults work a forty-hour week, we can only find time to get the house really cleaned and up to snuff for Christmas itself? And anyway, why does Christmas have to come to a screeching halt at midnight on the 25th? There are supposed to be twelve days of Christmas. Even barring actual religious observance of the holiday, that gives us until January 6th to leave the tree up and squeeze in some more gatherings.

I’m all for reinstating the old Season. It would take some of the furor out of December, and spread it around. Wouldn’t it be pleasant to go to one wintertime party and not be assaulted with pine cones, magnolia leaves, evergreen garlands and red-and-green everything? If you had your party in late January rather than December 14th, you wouldn’t have to obsess over getting the house decorated in time.

January and February in this part of the world are cold, wet and dreary enough. It would be a real pleasure if someone — anyone — would throw a party. And it would prolong eggnog consumption for another month or two.