This is it. This is the end of the summer, even if you get to spend the next four weeks lounging around in shorts. It’s time for one final holiday repast, a wake for August, a joyful party with family and friends. You can take part even if you loathe the dark arts of entertaining, even if your summer residence is the same walk-up in which you greet February’s dawn, even if planning is not your bag. Just make a few calls, put out some food and something to drink, light a couple of candles and allow everyone to gather as if you won’t see them for a year. Embrace the symbolism. Say goodbye.

It doesn’t have to be a feast. Of course you could spend your Labor Day tending a small fire in the vicinity of a large hog split open on a grate, or steaming lobsters over hot rocks and seaweed on the beach. You could have a fish fry or set up a hot-dog assembly line or prepare a glistening spiral-cut ham to serve with a neat stack of potato rolls and good mustard. You could arrange a buffet: cold poached salmon and green beans in vinaigrette surrounded by quarters of hard-boiled egg, with cheese cubes, stuffed mushrooms and fancy coleslaw on the side. But this can be a lot of work, and the experience of eating your labor difficult, with everyone standing around with plates and knives and forks and sweating glasses of wine.

The caterer, chef and cookbook writer Bert Greene divided party food into two categories: the kind you eat on the fly and the kind you eat on the hoof. A buffet is hoof-food, he wrote in “The Store Cookbook” in 1974, a volume devoted to recipes and reminiscences of the gourmet shop he ran in Amagansett with his partner, Denis Vaughan. Greene, who died in 1988, did not approve of hoof-food. “Pure hell,” he called it, the domain of “professional ball-throwers” and “sado-hostesses.” He preferred to serve fly-food, he wrote, “anything that can be wolfed down while waiting for another turn at the bar.”