Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Games for Hallowe'en

I was fairly gob-smacked, or perhaps even "goblin-smacked" given the season, when I found this 1912 edition of "Games for Hallowe'en" sitting on a bookshelf at an estate sale.  It was laying flat, so clearly someone had already seen it and passed it over.  We're coming down the wire to the big day.  Maybe this book will help with your plans.

Written at the time Hallow-e'en (or Hallow-Even) was just beginning to grow in popularity, it offers party ideas and suggestions to help plan and host a Halloween party.  The first several pages include instructions on how to decorate for the party.



After the decorations comes entertainment ideas.  Below are some of the more interesting and classic games they suggest.  Many have to do with predicting relationships and your personal future.




 "Combing Hair before Mirror" brings to mind the postcard I featured back in 2017.

Mary Blain was the author of a number of books, mainly about party games or Halloween folklore.

The entirety of this book is available from Amazon for free Kindle download.

11 comments:

  1. I don't know...the lighted candle used to play "Candle and Apple" sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

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  2. "Decorated as grotesquely as possible" - yep I can do that. But fitting paper lanterns over your gas jets? The fire danger must have been off the charts. The dumb game sounds interesting. I can't imagine asking party guest to sit silently for an hour while they watched some dough in front of the fire.

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    1. Yeah, the paper lanterns over the gas jets sounds even more dangerous than the candle/apple game. re: sitting for an hour watching dough bake: apparently we were much more easily amused back then.

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  3. it's interesting how virtually all of these are preoccupied with divining the kids' future spouse (always of the opposite gender, of course). what about other things? good ol' fashioned "talking to spirits about the afterlife" would be fine by me. or just creepy ghost stories. and were there really that many walnut trees around back then, where anyone could just walk out of their house and find one a short distance away?

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    1. Black Walnut trees are in abundance around me, although they don't split nice like English Walnuts and you'd probably be hard-pressed to make a viable boat out of one. I'm guessing talking to spirits or telling ghost stories would be the equivalent of communing with the Devil at the time and not suitable for a family-friendly book.

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    2. balderdash, i say! the other pages in the book clearly mention "spirits of darkness" and dabbles in light prophecy, and those things should be verboten as well if this was really some sort of god-fearing, family book.

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    3. Oh, I missed those. You're right, clearly, these people had no issues communing with the dead.

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  4. Thanks for sharing this! Just grabbed my Kindle copy.

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  5. Also gonna grab a copy of the Kindle version, thanks. But so very cool that you have an actual real copy? So cool.

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