Have a big pumpkin filled with yellow chrysanthemums for the center of the table and at each place a tiny pumpkin made into a candle with a green pumpkin leaf shade. Light the room with jack o' lanterns or yellow Chinese lanterns. For the menu serve cream of corn soup in yellow bowls. Serve turkey, cranberry jelly, mashed turnips, baked sweet potatoes, on yellow plates. Serve fruit salad in the red apple cups, with pumpkin pie and yellow ice cream frozen in shape of pumpkins, for dessert. Serve coffee in yellow cups.
Fourth of July Dinner.
A beautiful summer dinner for July Fourth is as follows: On the table have a centerpiece of pineapple cloth over pale green satin, on which place a flat willow basket of green and white striped grasses that border the garden flower beds. From this basket have wavy lines of pale green gauze ribbon reaching to each corner of the table, the ribbons ending in flat bouquets of daisies tied with grasses. The dinner cards should be cut out of water-color paper in the shape of long, narrow spikes of lilies and fastened to the glasses by flaps on the backs. The menu is clam bisque; lobster cutlets with egg sauce; timbales of sweetbreads; new carrots with fine herbs; crown of lamb with mint sauce; potato croquettes and salsify; peach ice; truffle-stuffed squab, cress; asparagus and lettuce salad; green cornucopiae of ice cream filled with lemon ice; white cake with green icing; coffee, nuts glace.
A Luncheon for Thanksgiving.
Have this sentiment painted on a white or dark gray background framed in cedar boughs and placed over your mantel:
The waning year grows brown and gray and dull,
And poets sing November, bleak and sere;
But from the bounteous garnered harvest store,
With grateful hearts we draw Thanksgiving cheer.
Place a row of white candles in pewter candlesticks across the mantel and display all the old china, pewter, brass and copper about the dining-room. Use cedar boughs to decorate the chandelier and plate rail. In the center of the bare table have a miniature stack of wheat (the florist can furnish this). Peeping out of the wheat have toy turkey candy boxes filled with almonds or hickory nut meats and raisins. Have the candles on the table set in flat cedar wreaths and scatter pine needles over the surface of the table. At each plate have a little doll dressed in Puritan costume with the name card tied around her neck. If one wishes to add a bit of color to the table use old-fashioned blue and white or colored bowls, in one pile glossy red apples, in another purple and white grapes, in another oranges. Here are some suitable Colonial dishes: Brown bread, roasted fowl, oysters in every style, cakes of Indian meal called bannocks which are spread before the fire on large tins and baked before the fire, brown sugar and molasses for sweetening; fruit cake, molasses cake, pumpkin, apple and mince pie; jellies, jams and conserves (a sweet mixture of fruits). Use all the old-fashioned china and silver possible.
Thanksgiving Dinner.
First an old-fashioned oyster stew served in old white, gold-banded tureen.
Next fish-balls—not great, soggy old-fashioned fish cakes, but the daintiest little golden-brown balls, fried in a basket in hot fat, and not more than an inch in diameter, just a good mouthful. Have them served individually, smoking hot, heaped up in the daintiest little piles, with a few tiny sprigs of baby parsley for garnish.