Being a 30-something without kids (yet) I have to confess that most of my dinners are eaten on the couch and in front of the TV. I have a lovely dining room that quietly sits just waiting for the 2 or 3 times a year it will actually be used. I just really can't find a reason to use it on a day to day basis. I imagine that when I do have kids, I'll follow the footsteps of my mother and have "real" dinners, at the table, every night, at a set time. It will be "dinner time" and I will fully expect my kids to be there for it.
Even with my current dinner configuration, though, I do have one small element of formality - cloth napkins. A dear friend of mine will probably call this "hoity-toity" (a phrase I first heard when she compared New Jersey pork roll to "hoity-toity" SPAM) but to me, it's much more complex.
I admittedly have a bit of an "issue" about eating with my hands or having any kind of grease on my hands. Even with my East coast roots, I eat pizza with a knife and fork... and I am CONSTANTLY wiping off my hands when I eat. So, in some ways, it's just impractical for me to use paper napkins. I will go through STACKS of them and they never really seem to be substantial enough to make me feel like my hands are clean. It just seems tremendously wasteful.
So several years ago, I made the switch to cloth napkins. In environmentalist circles there are debates over which is actually the more "green" option. Paper napkins contribute to deforestation, there is the energy and resources required to make them, and when they break down, they release methane in to the atmosphere. However, there are paper napkins made with recycled fibers that have less impact to the environment in the manufacturing process. Cloth napkins are reusable, but bleached cotton napkins are much more damaging to the environment (from a manufacturing perspective) than paper. Linen napkins are more environmentally friendly than cotton, but then again, with all that washing, are they really better? There are a lot of viewpoints... and just as many variables that could make either one a better option than the other.
Given all of that, for me, cloth napkins work best. I use way too many napkins to justify paper, and for some reason I can use one cloth napkin for several meals (unless it's something really messy) without feeling like the napkin is "dirty". I'm sure the fact that I limit the hand-to-food contact has something to do with it. I have a bunch of cloth napkins that I've used for years. I wash them with the rest of the towels/dish towels, and I use a biodegradable, non-toxic detergent in a high-efficiency washer. I have no doubt that for my situation, cloth wins the green debate. When these napkins finally meet their doom, I plan to try to make some of my own "shabby-chic" napkins with some old clothes and pinking shears.
While for some, cloth napkins are a sign of pretention and hoity-toity-ism (that's right, I just made that up...) to me, they are just another way that I can live my crunchy, dirty hippie, tree-hugging convictions.
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