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An Indian Summer Shower
FOR the girl who is to be married in the winter, an Indian Summer Shower might be given some November evening. The cards of invitation can have a little brown Indian wigwam painted in one corner, or cut out of brown paper and pasted on; or the invitations can be written on pieces of white birch bark, if you happened to have gathered and saved any from the summer vacation. Paper imitation of birch bark might also be used.
Put all the gifts, wrapped in brown tissue paper and tied with gay ribbons, in a toy wigwam which you can make with three sticks and a piece of brown burlap. When the right time comes, the engaged girl is led up to the wigwam and asked to receive the gifts.
If there is a small brother or cousin who can be dressed up in an Indian suit to hand out the presents, so much the better. [132] The hostess may make this any kind of shower she wishes.
After the wigwam has been sacked, it would be fun if you could sit around the open fire to pop corn or toast marshmallows and play the Indian Summer game of "Pipe Dreams."
Each girl writes out an imaginary dream of the bride's future. The dreams are read by the hostess, and then each dream paper is consigned to the fire.
The refreshments ought to be very simple, and may consist of hot chocolate and little chocolate cakes, cone-shaped to simulate wigwams, or they may be merely apples, nuts, pop-corn, and sweet cider. Serve the nuts and apples in Indian baskets. [133]
A November party for a girl marrying in the winter, built around a theme no host would use today. The structure underneath it is sound, and it can be lifted away from the dressing.
- The structure is reusable, the theme is notGifts hidden inside a prop and produced at a chosen moment, a written game about the bride’s future, a fire to sit round, and food the guests cook themselves. None of that depends on the costume element, and a host today would change the theme rather than attempt to explain it.
- Birch bark should stay on the treeThe page suggests writing invitations on bark gathered on a summer holiday. Stripping bark from a living birch damages it and a ring cut right round will kill it. Printed paper that imitates bark, which the page also offers, is the whole of the effect at none of the cost.
- Burlap is hessianThe same cheap jute sacking, sold in rolls at garden centres as well as craft shops. Three sticks and a few yards of it is the entire prop, which is the kind of economy this book is good at.
- Pipe Dreams works under another nameEach guest writes out an imagined future for the bride, the host reads them aloud without saying who wrote which, and the papers then go into the fire. The burning is what makes it land: the game has an ending, and nothing is kept to embarrass anyone later.
- The hostess cooks nothingPopcorn and marshmallows at the open fire, apples, nuts and cider. That is why the page can call the refreshments very simple and mean it, and it is a real strategy for an evening party: give people something to do with their hands instead of something to be served.
- Sweet cider here is apple juiceIn this book’s American usage cider means the unfermented pressing. A British reader who follows the page literally will be serving alcohol at a party the author intended to be dry, which changes the evening considerably.
Every page in this chapter is a different container. The gifts for a shower had to be concealed and then produced as a single moment, and the chapter works its way through the possibilities: a wigwam of sticks and burlap here, a kitten, a Christmas tree, a camp fire elsewhere in the same run of pages. The theme is chosen from whatever the calendar offers, which is why a shower given in November reaches for a spell of late warmth and the fireside, and why the refreshments are the ones you can cook at a hearth. The household assumed is one with an open fire in a room big enough to sit round, a small brother or cousin available to be dressed up and put to work, and a hostess who would make the invitations by hand. The theme itself, a party costumed as somebody else’s culture, was unremarkable to the book’s readers and is the part of this page that has not survived.