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Birthdays and Other
ANNIVERSARIES BIRTHDAYS you particularly wish to celebrate happily and successfully. There's your mother's birthday or your brother's or your little son's or daughter's birthday or the birthday of the popular president of your special club.
Then there are the various wedding anniversaries that call for suitable recognition, especially the five, ten, and twenty-five year ones.
Besides these there are countless other events that you want to commemorate pleasantly in some way afterward. These various occasions offer fascinating possibilities for the most delightful of social affairs. [79]
This is a chapter opening rather than a party: the short page that introduces the book’s section on birthdays and anniversaries. There is nothing here to cook or to make, and it helps to know that before looking for it.
- A heading set inside a sentenceThe opening sentence has been broken by the way the printed page set its headings, so it begins mid-thought. Read it as: there are birthdays you particularly wish to celebrate happily and successfully.
- Which anniversaries countedThe page picks out the fifth, tenth and twenty-fifth, and the book carries separate chapters for the wooden wedding, the tin wedding and the silver one. The scheme of gift materials is what made each of those a different kind of party and what told guests what to bring.
- The club president’s birthdayIt sits in the same list as a mother’s, a brother’s and a small child’s. Membership of a social club carried real obligations, and the birthday of its officers was one of them.
- Where the instructions actually areFor anything practical, go to the chapters this page introduces: the ones named for a particular anniversary, and the birthday luncheons and teas. This page sets an expectation and hands you on.
The assumption behind these few lines is that a birthday is an occasion requiring organisation: invitations, a scheme, favours, a planned menu. A brother’s birthday, a small son’s, the president of a club’s, each is an affair to be designed. That degree of formality in ordinary domestic life is the thing most completely lost between this book and now, and it is also the reason the book could run to this many chapters.