True Tales of Weeding: A Cherry Tree Party

What with all the craziness and many projects going on in my life, it’s been tough for me to find time to read good books, much less bad ones to talk about here. Nevertheless, True Tales of Weeding makes a triumphant if limited return for Presidents’ Day with advice from 1904’s one-stop guide to parties Entertainments for All Seasons , constituting probably the worst party idea in the history of the world. Note the parts I have emphasized:

A Cherry Tree Party: …At this point a small tree was placed in the center of the room. Its trunk was made of brown clay, and it was labeled “A Cherry Tree”.

The game consisted in seeing who could first succeed in hacking it down, each person going in turn, blindfolded, after being turned around three times. This was no easy task, and when it finally fell beneath the hatchet, the hostess, with a great assumption of sorrowful surprise asked:

“Who cut down my cherry tree?”

“It was I. I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.” proudly replied the perpetrator of the deed.

“It’s what I have expected,” gravely announced the hostess, “ever since the school-books made so much of George’s little act; therefore, I had the cherries picked and made into conserves as a reward for thy truthfulness.”

As the recipient bowed low over his box of cherries, he vowed always to chop down cherry trees and tell the truth.  

Perhaps this is simply a case of cultural distance, but giving people axes, blindfolding them, spinning them around, and then shoving them in the general direction of a clay tree has “potential lawsuit” written all over it. The hostess could easily have ended up asking “Who put an axe in Augustus’s skull?” Cherry conserves, tasty though they be, don’t really cover that kind of damage.

Entertainments for All Seasons contains gems like this on almost every page and I can’t possibly do it justice in one True Tales of Weeding. You’ll be seeing more sketchy party ideas as the year progresses.