Party Time!

By Janice Lane Palko

Maybe it’s because of my age, but recently social media has been flooding my feeds with nostalgic videos of what times were like in the 70s and 80s. They show people crammed into homes for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other social events, smiling, laughing, and simply enjoying themselves.

It’s easy to put a gloss on the past, making everything seem better in the olden days, but in some ways those days were truly better. 

The DDB Needham Life Style Surveys has been tracking consumer and social behavior since the mid-1970s, and their data has revealed a sharp drop in human interaction. According to their findings, in the mid-1970s, the average American hosted friends or neighbors in their home approximately 14-15 times per year, that’s more than once a month. There has been a 71 percent decline in that from 1975 to this year. But the drop wasn’t only in hosting people in their homes. Back then many people also used to get together and play cards and that has dropped off by 67 percent, and even church attendance has plummeted by 58 percent. 

Those who study the trends cite many reasons, from television to proliferation of smart phones, to more women being in the workforce, to spending more time commuting to work.  The COVID pandemic seemed to be the final blow. But being alone hasn’t made us any happier. 

The World Happiness Report 2026 reports that people under 25 are much less happy than that group was 15 years ago. The report offers a bit of information that is revealing: “Life satisfaction is highest at low rates of social media use and lower at higher rates of use, according to data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).”

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, my parents had two couples who were their friends, and they regularly came to our house or we went to theirs. It wasn’t anything fancy.

My mom would get some pretzels or chips and dip, some pop for the kids, and my dad would get a case of beer for his buddies. They just sat around the dining room table, snacking, talking, and laughing, while we kids played or watched TV. We had no cell phones back then, so any screen gazing was not done in isolation but communally via the television. 

Even when I had kids 30-40 years ago, my neighborhood was very social. I belonged to a play group with the other moms, the garden club, and book club, not to mention attending numerous social events the civic association sponsored like the annual block party and progressive dinner. To my knowledge none of those functions are still going on.

With the holidays coming up, my mind has traveled back to Thanksgivings and Christmases of the past. Thanksgiving was usually spent with my Lane side of the family. Our family of six and my Uncle Paul’s family of nine, as well as my grandmother and bachelor Uncle Bill would cram into Uncle Paul’s house, the kids sitting at card tables set up in their entry hall. 

Christmas was no different; it was spent in the company of others from attending church to organized parties to family get-togethers. Now people put up their trees and take them down the day after Christmas. Back then we put up our trees later and spent the holidays—the days between Christmas and New Year’s—visiting friends and relatives to see their tree, which didn’t look much different from the previous year; it was simply an excuse to get together and party.

You can’t make memories at home alone scrolling. You need others to make memories. Maybe the secret sauce to all those nostalgia videos is that it was best of times because we were sharing those days with others. So, as we approach the holidays, maybe it’s time to reverse the decline in our socializing and do something about it. Invite some friends or family over, and who knows maybe 30 or 40 years from now, you’ll be looking back on today’s celebrations with nostalgia too.