Entertaining Made Easy Part 8

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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 then a.s.signed 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.

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 s.h.i.+ny tin funnel filled with bright garden or wild flowers surrounded by a frill of lace paper to represent an old-fas.h.i.+oned, 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 s.h.i.+ny 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.

Tin whistles for everybody would promote the hilarity.

The old-fas.h.i.+oned 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.

A MOCK WEDDING

A mock wedding is a funny way to celebrate one of the numerous early wedding anniversaries, especially if a group of young married women friends want to join in a surprise.

The bride may be invited to a chum's house and presently the procession may appear before her.

The bride should have a cheesecloth or mosquito netting veil with dried orange peel to hold the folds in place, and she should carry a bouquet of white chicken feathers tied with white tape--the shower part can be little bows of rags.

The bridesmaids might all wear the cheapest of farmers' hats, with huge bunches of goldenrod or asters on them or else such things as little kitchen utensils sewed on the front in place of flowers.

Bouquets of burdock tied with colored cretonne would be attractive for them, or possibly as a subst.i.tute for the conventional shepherds'

crooks they could carry umbrellas with big bows on the handles. A third suggestion for the bridesmaids is that they carry grape baskets filled with none too choice outdoor flowers and weeds.

There should be a flower girl, of course, who can wear an abbreviated costume. Her hair should be in ringlets with a big ribbon tied around her head, and she may carry a market basket filled with sc.r.a.ps of paper, or flowers if you prefer, to scatter in front of the bride.

The ring bearer may carry a curtain ring on a sofa cus.h.i.+on.

At the ceremony, of course, you must omit all the really solemn parts, but you may let someone make up some questions for the minister to use. For instance, he may say to the mock bridegroom, "Do you promise to obey this woman?" Instead of saying, "I will" and "I do," they may say, "I wilt" and "I doth."

For a wedding breakfast, you might serve creamed codfish in heavy crockery, and follow it with helpings of cream of wheat either cold or hot, which can be served to resemble ice cream in little paper cases.

There should be a wedding cake which may be only ginger-bread, and some kind of grotesque motto may be inscribed in the frosting.

A SILVER WEDDING SHOWER

A little group, girlhood friends of more than twenty-five years standing, recently planned a pleasant shower for a popular friend, the president, as it happened, of their fortnightly sewing club, on her silver wedding anniversary.

None of the ladies was rich and the gifts were planned to cost not over fifty cents each. Many of them were less than that.

Silver fittings for a work basket were chosen and included a silver needle case, a silver thimble case, a silver hem gauge, a unique tatting shuttle, a little silver ripping knife, a cunning strawberry emery with a silver hull and a wee wax cherry with a silver stem.

The gifts were wrapped in white tissue paper, tied with silver cord with a tiny s.h.i.+ning bell inserted in the center of each knot. They were presented in a lovely sweet gra.s.s sewing basket, which in turn was wrapped and tied with silver ribbon.

This was not given, however, till the close of the afternoon's sewing, which had gone on as usual, though there was an atmosphere of ill-concealed expectation.

Simple refreshments were brought in and served in buffet style.

Home-made ice-cream was pa.s.sed in little ice cups which had as decorations around the rim a circlet of glittering silvery tinsel.

"Silver Cake" and bonbons in silver wrappings accompanied the ice cream.

Last of all, the "shower" was borne in on a silver tray and set before the surprised guest of honor. A little rhyme explained this turn of events to the delightfully mystified recipient:

_Because of many a happy hour With you, well spent, we give this shower, Just to remember in a way With love, your silver wedding day_.

As an amusing little contest each lady was asked to write down ten things she had learned in the last twenty-five years. The replies made good reading and furnished plenty of conversation till home-going time.

A CAPE COD LUNCHEON

In remembrance of a happy two weeks spent in a little bungalow on Cape Cod, one of the girls of the "bunch" gave a quaint luncheon for the others during the year following.

The invitations bore a tiny spray of bayberry sketched in one corner and read like this:

_May the bayberry dip and the odor of pine At this little reunion luncheon of mine, Bring back all our fun in the house by the sea, Where we were as jolly as jolly could be_.