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The Tin Wedding
THE tenth wedding anniversary has many possibilities for fun. An informal social evening or a dinner followed by some jolly stunts are in order.
In any case, arrange for the dining table a centerpiece of a shiny tin funnel filled with bright garden or wild flowers surrounded by a frill of lace paper to represent an oldfashioned, formal bouquet. Use tin candlesticks with bayberry candles for illumination and scatter tiny new patty pans with crinkly edges over the table to hold candies and nuts.
The salad may be served on shiny tin plates covered with lace paper doilies, the ice-cream in individual patty pans, and the coffee or punch in tin cups.
At each place put a tiny funnel bouquet, a miniature of the central one or else some tiny tin toy. [94] Tin whistles for everybody would promote the hilarity.
The old-fashioned game of "Spin the Platter" would be good to start the entertainment of the evening. Then may come a "tin" minute paper and pencil contest to see who can write the most words beginning or ending with TIN in the allotted ten minutes.
Ten "reel" years of married life may next be shown. This feature is simply a series of movie-like pantomimes showing humorous events, real or imaginary, in the life of the host and hostess - given, of course, by their friends.
A tin band concert will also provide a good time. Those who are in the band perform on instruments contrived from kitchen utensils or the tin noise-making novelties which can be obtained in the shops. [95] A
A tenth anniversary, and the material decides everything. The food is chosen for what it can be served in rather than for what it is.
- Patty pansSmall shallow tins for individual pastries, used here as dishes for sweets, nuts and ice-cream. A tartlet or bun tin is the same article, and the crinkled edge the page likes is the fluted version.
- Ice-cream in bare tin goes fastMetal conducts, and a portion sitting in an unlined patty pan on a warm table will slump long before a china dish would let it. Chill the pans hard and bring them out at the last moment, or the joke beats the dessert.
- Dressed salad on tinwareA vinegar dressing standing on bare tinplate can pick up a metallic edge wherever the coating is worn. Dress at the table, or line the plates with the lace paper doilies the page already calls for and let the paper do the work.
- Bayberry candlesMade from a hard, greenish wax with a faint spiced smell of its own. They are still sold, mostly around Christmas, and they burn slower and cleaner than a soft paraffin candle, which is why they suited a long evening.
- Read the chapter as a setTin is the tenth, and the book carries The Wooden Wedding alongside it. The page assumes you know the sequence of anniversary materials and will find the right chapter; nowhere does it list them.
The centrepiece of the evening is a thing called Ten Reel Years — a series of film-like pantomimes in which the couple’s friends act out ten years of their marriage in scenes, real and invented, with the pun doing the announcing. A domestic anniversary party whose main entertainment is an imitation of a motion picture tells you how fast the cinema had become the form that home amusement copied. The rest is noise: tin whistles for everyone, a band made out of kitchen utensils, and a ten-minute word game. Nothing here is expensive and nothing is kept.