For those unwanted holiday guests ...

This week I happened upon a wonderfully amazing article about holiday guests. Whether we can’t stand being one or having them, or even if you love the holidays, this is sure to resonate with you. I’ve kept only the best parts for brevity.
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November 30, 1997
New York Times
OUT OF ORDER; A Recipe for Unwanted Guests
By DAVID BOUCHIER

IT'S a pleasure to have house guests at Thanksgiving, and a positive delight to see them leave. As the last car backs out of the driveway, the happy hosts dance around the living room singing: ''They've gone! They've gone!''

Some guests are always welcome of course: dear friends, beloved parents and wealthy but aged relatives in delicate health. But these desirable visitors are as rare as a hot weekend in January. Thanksgiving and the holidays usually mean an invasion of miscellaneous aunts, cousins, fragments of the reconstituted family and young freeloaders earning twice as much as you ever did who won't spring for a couple of nights at Motel 6.

Once your guests are settled in, as they probably are right now, there's not much you can do about it. But you can plan for the future and guarantee that they won't ever come back. I call this technique ''focused hospitality,'' and it begins with the decision about where, how and whether your house guests will sleep during their stay.

Favored guests get the best bedroom, with a bathroom and every comfort. Below this, on a sliding scale, comes the spare bedroom, full of junk, gerbils in (and sometimes out of) cages, home wine-making experiments and unidentifiable smells. Uncle Ted can sleep on an inflatable mattress in the den, head under the television and feet under the desk. Even less favored guests can be banished to the almost-finished basement, where they can share the dramatic night lives of the household cats.

The convertible couch is a wonderful device for discouraging return visits. These torture machines have been perfected over the years by a special breed of insomniac puritanical sadists. No matter how much they cost, all convertibles feature the same quarter inch-thick mattress filled with Jell-O, powerful protruding springs made of high tensile steel and the patented collapsing middle. They won’t sleep, but they will remember the experience for years, and they won't come back.

There are more subtle discouragements for your unwanted guests. Most laundry closets can yield sheets with the texture of sandpaper, pillows that feel as if they are stuffed with dried broccoli stalks and thin repulsive towels stolen from French hotels in 1956. All these must be used ruthlessly. The longer the distance to the bathroom the better, and if the journey must be made over unknown terrain in utter darkness with many invisible obstacles (some of them alive), the chances are that your guests will lie awake all night, not quite daring to make the expedition. As they settle down to their sleepless vigil, reassure them with the words, ''Don't mind us, we always get up at 5; you get up just whenever you like.''

When it comes to feeding your visitors, there are two choices: healthy and unhealthy. Serving healthy food is probably the quickest way of emptying the house, but then you may have to eat the stuff yourself. The alternative is to serve enormous high-fat meals at frequent intervals, interspersed with sugary treats, until your guests are comatose.

Very soon, your guests will vanish over the horizon, joining the gigantic traffic jam at the Midtown Tunnel and congratulating themselves on their escape. But keep these guidelines for the next time you are a guest in someone else's house. They will help you to judge precisely the warmth of your welcome.