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A Happiness Tea
Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full o' rye, Four and twenty bluebirds Baked in a pie; When the pie was opened The birds began to sing, About a certain couple here Who have some news to spring.
THUS did one girl announce her engagement in the month of May. She had asked twenty-four of her best friends to come to a bluebird tea one Saturday afternoon, and nobody suspected her secret, although they did remember that the bluebird stands for happiness.
The party was held out on the hostess's big porch, which was decorated with jars of pink and white apple blossoms. Everybody had a very good time dancing to the music of the phonograph until it was time for the tea to be served. The waitresses were Betty's two little sisters, who wore as insignia big blue bows on their hair and cunning little aprons made of bluebird cretonne.
The tea was iced and served with lemon and mint in tall glasses. The sandwiches were tiny and round and filled with pink strawberry jam which made them seem like delectable apple-blossom petals. Betty happened to have bluebird plates and she used paper napkins with a bluebird motif.
After the sandwiches came little pink and green and white frosted cakes and last of all the surprise. It appeared to be a great pie with bluebird heads peeking through the crust. In reality the crust was just brown paper touched up with a bit of water color paint and pasted across the top of a big open pan. The bluebirds soon showed what they were when the guests in turn pulled them out of the pie by means of the narrow white ribbon attached to each one. They were [112] really flat pasteboard bluebirds and served as the excuse for the rhyme announcing Betty's engagement.
As a souvenir each guest had a tiny bluebird May basket filled with pink and white Jordan almonds. Small square boxes formed the foundations of the May baskets, the sides were then covered with bluebird crepe paper and the corners tied with wee blue bows. Little cut-out bluebirds hung from the slender handles and bore the names of the individual guests.
When they said good-by, the guests all declared that they had had a bluebirdy time, which in other words meant that Betty had planned very happily. [113]
An engagement announced by stunt: twenty-four guests, a bluebird theme, and a false pie with ribbons to pull. The food is slight and almost beside the point, which is true of nearly every party in this book.
- The pie is the recipeBrown paper painted to look like a crust, pasted over an open pan, with flat pasteboard birds underneath on narrow white ribbons. It is stagecraft and it still works. Cut the paper a little larger than the pan and paste it down onto the rim, or the first pull drags the whole crust off.
- Iced tea in tall glassesWith lemon and mint, for an afternoon in May. Brew it at double strength and cool it before it goes onto ice, or the melt leaves it thin. Tea brewed hot and then chilled also goes cloudy, which is harmless and which none of these books ever mentions.
- Food for one handRound sandwiches the size of a bite, then small frosted cakes. The page wants them to look like apple-blossom petals; the structural lesson is the useful one. A tea where people are standing, dancing and pulling ribbons out of a pie needs food that takes one hand and no plate.
- Jordan almondsSugared almonds at a betrothal are a very old European habit, and the book reaches for them without explanation because its reader needed none. They are still sold and still the right favour for this particular announcement.
- One motif, everywhereThe bluebird runs through the aprons, the hair bows, the plates, the napkins, the crepe paper and the baskets. These were ordinary printed goods, bought by the yard and the roll, and the effect does not depend on the quality of any single item but on the repetition. A printed napkin and a spool of ribbon will do it now.
The engagement is announced to twenty-four women on a porch before it is announced to anybody else, and the book gives that moment a whole chapter of its own. Announcements and Showers sits alongside Birthdays and Anniversaries and Weddings as one of the standing categories of a hostess’s year, which tells you how much organised sociability was built around the stages of one woman’s engagement — the announcement party, then the showers, then the wedding, each requiring invitations, a theme, a colour, favours and a stunt. The labour is unpaid and invisible and considerable, and it is performed by the women for each other. Two of the servers are children: the hostess’s young sisters, dressed in bluebird cretonne, wait on the twenty-four guests. The bluebird itself the page explains for us, as the emblem of happiness, which is why nobody present suspected the theme of giving anything away.