Lady Hollyhock and Her Friends: A Book of Nature Dolls and Others

The Acorn Family

IN the autumn when the acorns began to fall the children found no end of amusement in making them up into all sorts of people and animals.

Some were converted into soldiers—Japanese, with blue kimonos and Russians with long fur overcoats—and often they were lined up for battle. Ruthlessly the children shot them down with bean shooters. Since their sympathies were with the Japs, of course the Russians suffered most, yet there were losses on both sides.

While the brown of the acorns suggested Japs and Filipenos, it was equally suggestive of our own negro people, so numbers of these were made with their blue checked gowns and red bandanas.

Then there were just ordinary acorn men and women, with acorn heads on toothpick necks, and bodies of twisted paper.

One attractive pair was dressed in corn-colored crinkled tissue paper. A round disk of the paper was pasted to the top of the head of each for the brim of a hat, and the cup of the acorn pasted over that for a crown. No prettier doll hats could be imagined.

The shoes these little people wore were of ink.

Everything the acorn family had was made, like themselves, of acorns. Their cups and saucers, their plates, their baskets, their tops, and their pigs, even, were of acorns.

Tom enjoyed the tops most. These were made by running slender toothpicks, or shoepegs, about halfway through the acorns which spun on their own points. Games were often played with these tops.

When any one wanted to know which army would be victorious in battle two tops were set spinning on a plate and each named for an opposing army. The one falling over first was defeated, of course. Sometimes one spun itself off the plate. That meant a retreat.

Disks of bright colored paper were often placed above the top on the toothpick or shoepeg. When red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet were used and all the tops set spinning at the same time, this meant that a rainbow had gone to pieces and each color was doing its best to get back into its proper place.