Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Essays

Make Your Own Friend Friday

A collection of random but useful advice for all your lingering questions.

Virginia Sole-Smith's avatar
Virginia Sole-Smith
Sep 16, 2025
∙ Paid

ICYMI, we’ve been devoting much of this month to our continued conversation about hosting Friend Fridays — or your equivalent deep casual hosting experience. The advice you’ll find here is a mix of tips from you, me, and folks who think and write about this stuff a lot! You can find all our Friend Friday content here.

Last weekend’s pizza night (plus leftover pasta for the kids who don’t eat pizza)

To wrap up this series, today I’m going to download every slightly random tip or idea that came up in the course of our (now many!) Deep Casual Hosting conversations.

To start: I’ve mentioned her 900 times already, but don’t sleep on Katherine Goldstein’s work; “Deep Casual Hosting” is her concept and she’s been thinking through ALL the logistics.

The Double Shift
8 Ways to Embrace “Deep Casual Hosting” (So You’ll Actually Do It)
Reader support makes my work possible. Thanks for subscribing and paying if you are able…
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a year ago · 1434 likes · 131 comments · Katherine Goldstein
The Double Shift
More Advice for the “Deep Casual” Hosting Movement!
If you like my ideas about community building and want exclusive content like audio newsletters, Zoom hangouts, and more, please consider becoming a paying member. Membership is crucial for putting this work out into the world and allows me to support my family…
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a year ago · 18 likes · 1 comment · Katherine Goldstein

And, here’s Katherine in conversation with Amanda Litman, who has written about her family’s weekly Saturday dinner project here and here.

Also, when we talked about hosting for introverts, I failed to link to this excellent Lisa Sibbett piece and need to rectify that here:

The Auntie Bulletin
The Introvert’s Guide to Cultivating – and Actually Enjoying – Community
Monday, September 8 at 11:30am Pacific / 2:30pm Eastern / 7:30pm GMT, tune in to Substack Live when I’ll be chatting with Allison Lichter of the excellent newsletter, The Matriarchy Report. The subject of our conversation is: “Too Few People Are Doing the Carework – and Too Many People are Doing Bullshit Jobs.” (In case you’re not aware, “bullshit job” …
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a year ago · 151 likes · 25 comments · Lisa Sibbett

And here’s an assortment of other hopefully useful tips!

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