Real party: a coastal-grandmother baby shower in Charleston

Linen, blue hydrangeas, deviled eggs on a silver tray. Inside the loveliest shower we've seen all year.

On a Saturday afternoon in late March, in a salt-grayed cottage just past the Charleston harbor, twenty women sat under a striped awning and ate deviled eggs off a silver platter that may or may not have been a wedding gift in 1962.

The mother-to-be wore linen. Everyone else wore linen. There was a great deal of linen.

The food was simple and exceptional: cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off, shrimp salad on toasted brioche, a sheet cake with whipped cream and strawberries that nobody could stop talking about. The flowers were blue hydrangeas in mismatched silver bowls. There were no balloons. There was no banner. There was not a single piece of pastel-printed paper.

Instead, there was a long table set with the host's grandmother's china, candles in glass hurricanes against the wind, and a small stack of letters, one from each guest, written ahead of time, to be read by the baby on her eighteenth birthday.

The cleverest detail: a side table with three things and only three things. A Polaroid camera. A jar of folded paper slips with conversation prompts. A bottle of cold champagne with a single etched coupe glass beside it, "for the mother only, please."

It cost less than you'd think. It will be remembered for decades. Restraint, as the host put it, is the most generous form of taste.