Peter McKay

This year, my wife and I decided we were going to see off the year — what I think everybody can agree was a pretty rotten year (and decade, for that matter) — with a bang by having a New Year's Eve party.

For years, we'd had Halloween parties every October, our one big blowout of the year. But it got old. Selecting a new costume every year gets tedious, and worse, we'd end up spending the next day cleaning up bits and pieces of neighbors' costumes off the floor. One year I found a huge pair of leprechaun shoes and fake ears in our second-floor bathroom, leading me to worry that we'd find the rest of the leprechaun somewhere. So, this year we decided to hold off and wait till New Year's Eve.

Growing up in the 70s, my parents always had a huge New Year's Eve party, with drunken neighbors falling all over each other like an episode of "Love, American Style." It was a party I witnessed firsthand because I worked every year as a bartender, wearing a little straw hat and mixing drinks for all the neighbors for tips. I made a mean whiskey sour.

That, however, was a different age, and I would never ask my kids to do anything like that, especially because I know from hard experience that none of my kids can mix a proper drink.

As we'd planned this party so quickly, though, my wife decided to forgo the whole process of doing invitations and making our daughters go door-to-door delivering them. (We're not against child labor; we just think kids make better envelope lickers and mailmen than bartenders.) Instead, my wife set up the invitations through the Internet, using something called an "Evite."

Evite allows you to create one invitation and then e-mail to all your friends. Each of your friends gets the invitation via e-mail, opens it and then has a chance to E-respond. You get a notification whenever a friend E-RSVP's, and potential guests can see who else is going.

This is one of those cyber inventions supposed to make life easier, but it actually just screws things up.

First, you can see when someone's opened your invitation. If they don't respond, it's really awkward. It would be like calling someone on the phone to invite them, and then getting silence on the line until you hang up in embarrassment. Second, they can see who else has responded. They can wait until other people sign on, holding back their response until enough others respond that they're sure — really sure — the party is worth attending. That would be like having people come to your house and peer in the window to see whether the party's actually kicking, before deciding whether to knock on the door. My wife and I actually did that once, but we were careful that no one saw us — we were quiet as mice as we slipped away across the lawn.

To make matters worse, the Evite only goes out to the e-mail addresses that you have. There were plenty of people who regularly showed up for Halloween that we didn't correspond with via e-mail. With some, in fact, I didn't even know their last names. To be really, really honest, I didn't even know some of their first names.

A week or so after we'd sent out our Evite, my wife told me that only a few people had E-responded. We actually considered cancelling the party. First, though, we decided to simply disable the feature that allowed guests to see who else was coming.

Suddenly, no one knew whether this was going to be a good party or not, and with just a few days to go, more and more people started saying they'd be there. Then with just a couple of days left, Evite, on its own, sent out an E-reminder, telling all the folks who'd ignored the first invitation that they had only a couple of days left to respond. We got a whole second wave of responses. In a matter of days, the party had doubled, even tripled in size.

We sat at the computer the morning of New Year's Eve, with more responses rolling across the E-threshold by the hour. My wife started to frantically make more food, and I ran to the pantry to see how many more bottles of champagne we would need. The kids, who have learned by now that we have no problem at all with child labor, ran to hide in their rooms.

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