Meal time is all the time

Dear Miss Manners: Is there an appropriate/standard time for Sunday dinner? We have been rotating Sunday dinner in the family starting between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m. It has been suggested that 3:30 is the typical time. I say that it’s too early and people will just get hungry around 7 p.m.

The theory is that if Sunday dinner is prepared by noon, then a family can nibble from it all day, having a sit-down dinner at 3:30 and then nibbles later.

My feeling is that the result will be overeating and that one should have three distinct meals of breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Gentle Reader: Are you a family of mice, that you must nibble all day? Nowadays, this is not uncommon, Miss Manners realizes. But others are more apt to report the habit as grazing, which makes them…

Never mind. Although Miss Manners does not address health issues, she agrees about the necessity for proper meals, because they are the centerpieces of a civilized life, featuring such delightful (but now endangered) practices as conversation and table manners.

Dinner by daylight on Thanksgiving and Christmas and, for some, on Sundays, is a holdover from earlier times. Eating the main meal during the day was the general rule well into the 19th century. It varied from before noon until dusk, and kept getting later and later over the centuries.

But the issue here should not be when a mid-day Sunday meal is traditionally served, so much as when your family is not so ravished as to gobble and wolf the food before it gets to the table.