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Mother's Birthday Tea
PLEASANT way for a daughter to entertain for her mother is to give a little informal afternoon tea, asking the mother's friends and their daughters and thus making it a kind of mother and daughter affair.
Send out the invitations on your calling card, writing your mother's name at the top.
If your mother likes surprises, arrange the party to be one if possible, but if she is like most mothers she will prefer to know what's going on and so be prepared.
The rooms should be decorated with flowers of the season. The country girl will find it easy in spring, summer, or fall.
During the afternoon a little program of previously arranged "mother" songs, lullabies and readings by some of the guests may agreeably interrupt the chat. [82] Tea, sandwiches and little cakes may be served in the dining-room from a festive birthday table. The centerpiece may be a bowl of pink roses - to match in number the years of the guest of honor. Candles from under rose-colored paper or silk shades may light the room, and if desired each guest may be presented with a miniature band-box covered with rose-sprigged paper or chintz - filled with wee pink and white candies. [83]
A small afternoon tea with almost no cooking in it at all. Everything on this page is arrangement.
- Do not put paper over a flameThe page suggests candles lit under rose-coloured paper or silk shades on a crowded tea table. That is the one instruction here not to follow. Paper and silk over an open flame is how table fires start, and a room of guests in loose afternoon clothes is the worst place for one.
- Tea, sandwiches and little cakesThat is the whole menu, and the work is in the number of small items rather than in any single dish. Sandwiches crustless and cut into fingers, cakes of one or two bites, nothing requiring a knife. A tea is deliberately slight.
- Roses counted to the yearsThe centrepiece is a bowl of pink roses matching in number the age of the guest of honour. Count before you order, and be sure the guest of honour would find it charming rather than pointed.
- An invitation issued on somebody else’s behalfThe daughter uses her own calling card with her mother’s name written at the top. The formula says at a glance who is giving the party and for whom, without a line of explanation. It is the period’s version of a subject line.
- The list doublesMothers and their daughters are invited together, so every acceptance is two people. That is the design of the party and also the catering problem hidden inside it.
The page pauses in the middle of its arrangements to say something sensible about people: arrange a surprise if your mother likes surprises, but most mothers would rather know and be prepared. It is the only practical warning given, and it is not about food. The shape of the occasion is a young woman acting as hostess in her mother’s house while her mother sits as the guest — invitations on the daughter’s card, the mother’s friends and their daughters paired down the table, and a programme of mother songs, lullabies and readings performed by the guests to interrupt an afternoon that would otherwise be two generations making conversation for three hours.