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Outdoor Affairs
OUT-OF-DOOR entertaining is perhaps the easiest kind of all - if you live in the country or the near-country. Anything elaborate in the arrangements would be quite out of keeping and there's something about being outdoors that takes away constraint. That's probably why outdoor parties, because they are simple and natural, bring people together in a spirit of good fellowship and are certain of success.
Children especially love them and young people always find an evening garden party entrancing.
One of the jolliest kinds of outdoor parties is a bacon bat. It may be a breakfast or a luncheon or a supper, but there is always bacon and an open fire.
Now that automobiles are so abundant, the possibilities for motor picnics and progressive motor parties are many and various. [53] A
A one-paragraph chapter opening that makes the argument for entertaining outdoors, followed by two examples. It is short enough to read as a statement of the book’s position.
- A bacon batThe book’s term for an outdoor meal built round bacon cooked over an open fire. It can be a breakfast, a luncheon or a supper; those two elements are fixed and everything else is improvised. Bat here means an outing or a spree.
- Progressive motor partiesProgressive means the party moves, with each course at a different house and the guests driving between them. The modern form is the progressive dinner, and the logistics are unchanged: fixed courses, a fixed order, and somebody has to go first.
- Now that automobiles are so abundantThe page dates itself in that clause. The car is new enough to be remarked on and common enough to plan a party around, and the whole category of the motor picnic depends on it.
- The country or the near-countryOutdoor entertaining is easiest, the page says, if you live in the country or the near-country. That is a description of the suburbs before the word was in general use. The reader being addressed has a lawn, a porch and a car.
- Nothing elaborateThe instruction is to keep the arrangements plain, on the grounds that anything elaborate would be out of keeping outdoors. It is a usable rule, and it is the reverse of what the indoor chapters of the same book recommend.
The claim made here is social rather than practical: that being outdoors takes away constraint, and that outdoor parties succeed because they are simple and natural and bring people together in a spirit of good fellowship. Read against the rest of the book — the place cards, the favours, the dance programmes, the announcement sprung at the table — it amounts to an admission of how much formality the indoor version carried. The garden and the open fire are being offered as a licensed holiday from the household’s own manners. The two groups the page singles out as benefiting most are children and young people, who had the least to gain from the formality in the first place.