Home › Announcements and Showers › An Apple Shower
An Apple Shower
GIRL who was very fond of apples in every form, so much so that all her friends knew about it, was given a clever shower after she became engaged.
The invitations were cut in apple shape and tinted a little with red and green water colors. The following verses voiced the plan of the party and notified the guests:
Invitation to a Shower Apples, apples everywhere Will doubtless make up half the fare On Elsie's future menu pad, As they are Elsie's greatest fad.
So if you'd keep that fact in mind In shower presents - 'twould be kind; Send it to me the day before And come on Saturday at four.
Fanuary the twentieth At Mary's house. [117] The first amusement of the afternoon was an apple-guessing contest, the names of different varieties of apples to be guessed from literal definitions, thus: The Royal Apple - King. After that there was an apple-peeling contest in Hallowe'en fashion and each girl threw the peeling over her left shoulder to discover the initial of her future husband.
Immediately following this, the hostess, with the help of one of the other girls, brought in a big bushel basket apparently filled with huge rosy apples, and set it down before the guest of honor.
When the green ribbon around the stem of each make-believe apple was untied, the red crepe paper opened out, disclosing, in wrappings of soft cotton, a variety of gifts for the apple-loving girl.
There was an up-to-date corer and a plate for baking apples, a fat plush apple pincushion for the kitchen, a red apple "bank" with a slit for savings, one of the beautiful Wallace Nutting photographs of a New England apple tree in full pink and white bloom, [118] an artistic brown basket for apples to be kept on the buffet or used for the breakfast table, and a delightful fruit bowl with an apple border.
One girl had contributed a little booklet of choice apple recipes, a jar of apple butter and another of home-made apple sauce. One artistic member of the group had stenciled a crash table runner for the porch table with a conventional apple design in yellow and orange and green, and another girl put the same design very decoratively on a round box of painted tin.
Two of the prettiest gifts were a cunning sports handkerchief with a cluster of apples stamped in one corner, and a smart flat silk hat ornament in the shape of three apples.
Before the happy bride-to-be had finished exclaiming over her gifts, the hostess served buffet refreshments that were as pretty as they were delicious. There were little individual molds of pink apple tapioca, topped with whipped cream and accompanied by small home-made cakes, frosted uniquely. [119] Each one had in the center of its white icing a miniature apple bough as a decoration, made from two red maraschino cherries, two leafshaped pieces of green angelica and a bit of citron.
As a surprise for each girl, the hostess had provided a tiny bunch of apple sachets, easily made from scraps of apple-colored silks. "I like apples more than ever now that I've begun to see their possibilities," the guest of honor declared. [120]
A shower built on one known fact about one girl: she likes apples. The refreshments are two items, and most of what needs translating is the craft and the gifts.
- The gifts were organised in advanceThe invitation tells the guests what to bring and asks them to send it the day before. That is so the hostess can wrap each present in red crepe paper as a fake apple and pack the lot into a bushel basket. The surprise is staged; the shopping was coordinated.
- Crash is a fabricThe stencilled table runner is on crash, a coarse plain-woven linen or cotton with a visible slub, sold by the yard for towels and runners. It takes a stencil well, which is why it appears whenever somebody in this book is decorating cloth.
- AngelicaThe apple boughs on the little cakes are two maraschino cherries, two leaf-shaped pieces of green angelica and a scrap of citron. Candied angelica stem is the green in old cake decoration, still made but hard to find, and nothing else gives that particular dull green.
- Apple tapioca, pinkIndividual moulds of apple and tapioca, set firm enough to turn out, topped with whipped cream. Tapioca cooked with fruit sets to a sliceable pudding. The pink came either from the skins or from colouring, and the page does not say which.
- The peel divinationOne unbroken apple peel thrown over the left shoulder to read the initial of a future husband is an old Hallowe’en fortune, and the book says so in those words. It is being used in January, at an engagement party, out of season and entirely on purpose.
- Wallace NuttingOne gift is a Wallace Nutting photograph of a New England apple tree in bloom. These were hand-tinted landscape prints sold framed in very large numbers, the standard respectable picture for an American wall. Naming the photographer in a gift list the way you would name a brand tells you how familiar they were.
What makes this account unusual is that an entire afternoon was designed out of a single piece of information about one person. The games are apple games, the invitations are cut in apple shapes, the presents are wrapped as apples, and the food is apple. Look at what the gifts actually are, though: a corer, a plate for baking apples, a fruit bowl, a basket for the buffet, apple butter and sauce in jars, a booklet of recipes copied out by hand. They are the furnishings of a kitchen the bride does not have yet. A shower was the machinery by which a group of young women assembled the material of a household between them, one object each, and the theme was the device that stopped two of them arriving with the same thing. Notice too how much is made rather than bought: stencilled, painted, sewn from scraps of silk. The money in this party is time.