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A Silver Wedding Shower
LITTLE group, girlhood friends of more than twenty-five years' standing, recently planned a pleasant shower for a popular friend, the president, as it happened, of their fortnightly sewing club, on her silver wedding anniversary.
None of the ladies was rich and the gifts were planned to cost not over fifty cents each.
Many of them were less than that.
Silver fittings for a work basket were chosen and included a silver needle case, a silver thimble case, a silver hem gauge, a unique tatting shuttle, a little silver ripping knife, a cunning strawberry emery with a silver hull and a wee wax cherry with a silver stem.
The gifts were wrapped in white tissue paper, tied with silver cord with a tiny shining bell inserted in the center of each knot. They were presented in a lovely sweet grass sewing [99] basket, which in turn was wrapped and tied with silver ribbon.
This was not given, however, till the close of the afternoon's sewing, which had gone on as usual, though there was an atmosphere of ill-concealed expectation.
Simple refreshments were brought in and served in buffet style. Home-made ice-cream was passed in little ice cups which had as decorations around the rim a circlet of glittering silvery tinsel. "Silver Cake" and bonbons in silver wrappings accompanied the ice cream.
Last of all, the "shower" was borne in on a silver tray and set before the surprised guest of honor. A little rhyme explained this turn of events to the delightfully mystified recipient: Because of many a happy hour With you, well spent, we give this shower, Just to remember in a way With love, your silver wedding day. [100] As an amusing little contest each lady was asked to write down ten things she had learned in the last twenty-five years. The replies made good reading and furnished plenty of conversation till home-going time. [IOI]
A twenty-fifth anniversary gift, given by a group of women who had known each other that long, with a strict ceiling on what anyone could spend. The gifts are all sewing tools, and most of them need explaining now.
- The sewing kit is half obsoleteA hem gauge, a tatting shuttle and a ripping knife are still made, under other names and for fewer people. The strawberry emery and the wax cherry are not. A hem gauge measures a fold, a ripping knife unpicks a seam, and a tatting shuttle makes a kind of knotted lace.
- An emery strawberry cleans needlesIt is a small stuffed pincushion filled with abrasive powder, and a needle pushed through it a few times comes out smooth. The wax cherry beside it was drawn along thread to stop it tangling. Both solved real problems with the tools of the time, which is why both have gone.
- Fifty cents cannot be convertedThe page sets a cap of fifty cents a gift so that nobody would be embarrassed, and it gives no year, so there is no honest way to turn that into a modern figure. What transfers is the cap itself, agreed in advance, not the number.
- Silver Cake means egg whitesIt is the counterpart of gold cake, which uses the yolks, and the pair existed because a recipe that took one left the other over. Here it is on the table because it is white, matching the silver theme.
- Tinsel on the rim of a food cupThe ice cups were decorated with a circlet of tinsel around the edge, which is not something to put next to food now. A paper band, a foil collar or a silver sugar rim gives the same flash of theme without the metal in the ice cream.
- The best idea on the page is the contestEach guest wrote down ten things she had learned in the last twenty-five years, and the answers were read out and carried the conversation until people went home. It costs a pencil and a piece of paper and it works at any gathering of people who know each other well.
The gift is not the subject of this page; the group is. A fortnightly sewing club with a president, made up of women who had been friends since girlhood more than twenty-five years earlier, none of them rich, planning something together for one of their number. The ceremony follows from that structure: the sewing went on as usual all afternoon so that the surprise would hold, the gifts were capped so that nobody’s contribution could be measured against anyone else’s, the refreshments were brought in and served buffet style by the members themselves, and the verse read out at the end was written by one of them. What the page preserves is a form of social life that was regular, small, cash-poor and entirely self-organised, and the reason the shower works is that the club already existed to carry it.