At my aunt's house the table seats everyone, just barely. Someone always ends up on the arm of a chair or standing, plate in hand, and the person who is standing is always the one who talks the loudest, which is everyone. It is the same scene every week and everyone pretends the seating arrangements are not a careful performance.
The food is the point, or at least the excuse. A mountain of rice, a fish curry, some green thing, something sour, a soup that everyone ladles over everything. Hosts always apologise that there is too little, which is transparent, because there is always a second round and a third. The apology is a ritual. So is the answer, which is that it is too much and you are not eating enough, all in the same breath.
Abroad, Sunday got quieter. The table got smaller, the guest list thinner. But the important part held — the part where the people you love find one room, argue gently about portion sizes, and stay longer than they planned. On the quiet Sundays I still think about the loud ones. The noise was the point too, I have decided. The noise is how the family checked that everyone was still there.
Nobody ever said it, but the Sunday lunch was not really about lunch. It was the one fixed point in the week, the thing that did not move when everything else did. It is why, when I set a table now, I set out too much food and apologise for not having more. It is not a habit. It is a carried-over answer to a question nobody asked, which is what most traditions are.