The perfect, unpretentious, well-constructed party bag was given to guests leaving a recent Hatchards party. It contained a wedge of farmhouse cheddar and box of cheese biscuits from Paxton & Whitfield, a bottle of good white wine and an elegant hardback copy of Lucky Jim.
The next evening, I tucked into all of these simultaneously, feeling spoilt, and meditating on how much nicer they were than some of the tat my children used to bring home from birthday parties in white polythene bags: a slice of synthetic birthday cake oozing its jam on to tadpole-sized balloons (which wouldn’t inflate, however hard you blew) and a polystyrene aeroplane whose wing broke off on assembly.
To come home from a children’s birthday party without a party bag these days is almost unthinkable. For adults, on the other hand (unless you’re a highly enviable fashion or beauty editor who gets bombarded with Chanel handbags, Dior scent and Smythson wallets), a good party bag comes as a delightful and unexpected surprise. It’s a treat to be given anything at all for free in the drainingly expensive decades of grown-updom. You travel home feeling lucky.
What you want in a party bag are practical, pleasure-giving nuggets that will raise the tone of your daily life. What you do not want are items that will clutter up your life and make you look like a freeloader. These include: a pamphlet telling you more than you want to know about the product being peddled or launched at the party; a folding umbrella with the firm’s name or logo on it; a branded biro; a branded telephone notepad; and a bottle of lime-infused water from a newly launched range.
Party bags are mostly given at commercial parties rather than private ones. Private party givers rightly feel that they’re spending enough giving the party in the first place, and that the onus should be on the guests to bring a present to them. One exception was Jeffrey Archer who, with his wife Mary, gave a wheel of Somerset cheddar to every one of their 400 guests (200 on successive evenings) at their annual shepherd’s pie and champagne parties in their London penthouse. They held the last of those last Christmas, Archer claiming exhaustion at the age of 84.
Those four delectable items I loved – cheese, biscuits, wine and book – are small fry compared with the contents of the party bags given to the nominees for Best Actor/Actress and Best Director at the Oscars. These are known as ‘Everyone Wins’ bags. This year, each bag contained 60 items (some abstract) worth a total of $178,000, including a three-night stay for ten at a luxury Swiss chalet, a seven-day wellness retreat in California, three nights at the Saint-Barth Paradise in the Caribbean and a BlendQuik personal portable blender.
The only downside is that these gifts (because they are not true gifts but are given in exchange for publicity) are taxable, so the recipients who redeem them will be liable for $46,000 in US federal tax. The truth is, not many do redeem them; it’s seen as rather naff for a Hollywood star to grab such freebies, and sadly they’re not transferable, so cannot be given to the cleaning lady.
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