Have a heart hung from the chandelier, the guests in turn being placed about eight feet from it, then request them to hold the left hand over one eye, raise the right arm even with the heart, and keeping it in that position, walk rapidly straight ahead and hit it with a finger, striking horizontally. It is declared easy to do until tried.
A Valentine Tea. 2.
Here are some contests for a valentine tea. Call on each one for an impromptu valentine. Award a book of rhymes for the best. Turn down the lights and require each man to propose to his partner. Prepare red cardboard hearts and write fortunes on them with baking powder and water. Ask each guest to select a heart and hold it to the fire when the writing will appear. Provide a fish pond with comic valentines. Provide a long table, sheets of fancy paper, flowers, pictures, paste, scissors and watercolors and ask each to make an original valentine. The game of hearts, the auction of hearts and the auction of valentines are old but excellent ways of amusing a company. For the auction of hearts the girls are in a separate room and a clever auctioneer calls off their charms and merits and knocks them down to the highest bidder, who does not know who he has bought until all are sold. A fancy dress party, each girl representing a valentine, is a delightful entertainment for the evening. A small boy may be used for Cupid and blindfolded. He takes a man from one side of the room and presents him to a girl on the other side of the room.
CHAPTER IX.
A Grandmother's Tea Party.
One of the newest suggestions for an original hospitality is "A Grandmother's Tea Party." If you have an "at home" day, as every busy woman should, and you want to serve tea to your guests, offer it to them as it was offered fifty years or more ago.
First of all, collect all of your antique table service. Every family has some dear old treasures of the kind—tea cups, old linen, flower vases, silver epergns, etc.
You probably have somewhere laid away a wonderful old damask cloth which dates back at least half a century. Cover the table with this and scatter over it a handful of carnations, allowing them to fall at haphazard.
The centerpiece will be in the form of a huge cake placed on a high glass dish. This confection might be resplendent in a design of blossoms and turtle-doves carried out in variously tinted icings as the old-time cakes so often were.