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The Wooden Wedding
AN informal evening party is perhaps the jolliest way to celebrate the fifth wedding anniversary.
After everybody has arrived, try a wooden smile contest. There will be any number of humorous attempts, but few will be wooden.
The contestant who smiles most woodenly may receive as a prize a gaily painted wooden jumping jack or any other wooden toy.
The next amusement can be a progressive one, consisting of putting together at tables wooden puzzles of all sorts, including jig-saw puzzles.
Puzzles make good prizes for this contest.
One of the carefully packed wooden boxes of candy is another possibility.
Another occupation that is appropriate and fun-making is a pea and tooth-pick contest. Wooden tooth-picks and dried peas soaked up are provided. Each person is [92] then assigned to construct one member of a tooth-pick wedding party properly. The tooth-pick persons when finished should form in a parade down the center of the library table.
A light buffet supper or simply ice-cream and coffee may be served in the dining-room.
Decorate the table with a central wooden bowl containing some simple flowers such as daisies, honeysuckles, snapdragons, nasturtiums, or whatever flowers are in season. There may be wooden candlesticks with candles to match the color scheme and small wooden plates and bowls for candies and nuts.
Serve the ice-cream on wooden plates covered with lace paper doilies, and give as favors tiny wooden household articles such as dolls' rolling-pins, clothespins, barrels, washtubs, spinning wheels, and the like. [93]
The fifth anniversary, and the party is organised entirely around a material. Almost nothing here is food: the hostess’s work is shopping and the guests’ work is games.
- What is actually servedIce cream, coffee, candies and nuts, or a light buffet supper. This is an evening party held after everybody has already had dinner, which is why the catering is so slight, and it is worth knowing before planning a full meal in answer to it.
- Toothpicks and soaked peasThe construction game is real craft and it does work. Dried peas soaked for a few hours go soft enough to push a toothpick into and then dry hard overnight, so the figures set and hold. Soaked too long they split, and the useful window is a few hours rather than a day.
- Wooden plates and lace doiliesThe ice cream goes onto wood over a paper doily, which solves the problem the page does not state. Bare wood absorbs, so a wet dessert put straight onto it both stains the plate and takes on the taste of it.
- Flowers in a wooden bowlDaisies, honeysuckle, snapdragons, nasturtiums — all garden flowers, all short-stemmed, all cut the same day. A wooden bowl wants a liner or a jar set inside it, unless you are willing to lose the bowl to the water.
- The favours are the jokeDolls’ rolling-pins, clothespins, barrels, washtubs, spinning wheels. Every one of them is a miniature of housework, handed out at a party for a woman five years married, and the page presents the collection as charming without remarking on what it is.
The anniversary-material list — wood for the fifth, tin, silver, and the rest — turned each anniversary into a shopping brief, and this page shows what a hostess did with one. The entertainment is a progressive party, the dominant form of home sociability of the period: guests move between tables at intervals, work at a set task, and are scored, with prizes at the end. It made conversation optional, which was its real appeal, and it required the hostess to buy a great many small objects in advance. Here they are wooden puzzles, a jumping jack, a boxed candy, wooden candlesticks, wooden bowls and a dozen miniature household tools, and the shopping is the labour of the evening. The toothpick wedding party that the guests build and parade down the library table is the one part that cost nothing, and it is also the only part that asked anybody to make something.