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When Mother Lets Us Give a Party / A book that tells little folk how best to entertain and amuse their little friends cover

When Mother Lets Us Give a Party / A book that tells little folk how best to entertain and amuse their little friends

Chapter 26: HIAWATHA PARTY
By Elsie Duncan Yale
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About This Book

A practical, illustrated handbook for children that explains how to plan and host simple parties with little or no help from adults. It covers invitations, assembling supplies and dress-up items, tableware and decorations, and recipes for easy refreshments, then provides dozens of themed programs—sandwich and candy pulls, sewing bees, doll entertainments, holiday and seasonal teas, indoor picnics, and culturally inspired gatherings—plus games, songs, and small take-home favors. Emphasis is on orderly preparation, tidy cleanup, and cheerful, creative presentation so young hosts can entertain and amuse their friends independently.

HIAWATHA PARTY

This is a party for the country, and though it sounds like a boys’ party, the girls will enjoy it, too.

For this you will need a target, one of the new guns which shoots rubber-tipped arrows, several boxes of beads, a set of quoits, boomerangs (which you can buy for twenty-five cents at a toy store), a football, and a number of prizes. These may be Indian baskets, birch bark canoes, or anything that is Indian. For your costume you can buy a “Hiawatha” or “Minnehaha” suit from a dollar up, or for twenty-five cents you can get a kind of Indian apron which is stamped on muslin, all ready to cut out. Write your invitations on birch bark, with your pyrography set (if you have one), and ask your friends to wear Indian costumes and to take an Indian name for the occasion.

A Hiawatha Party should be a field day of outdoor sports, so arrange a program of races, (obstacle and hurdle races would be fun) and have a prize for each winner. Quoits is an Indian game, or at least, the Indians play a game very much like our quoits, and when your guests are tired of this, set up your target for an archery contest. The girls will enjoy making bead necklaces, and if they have brought their dolls, each doll must be strapped to a board in “papoose” style, and be fastened to her “mother’s” shoulders.

Indians are fond of football, although they don’t play by rules, for they simply kick the ball about, and each tries to keep it as long as possible.

Boomerangs are very fascinating toys, which will sail through the air, circle around the object you aimed at, and come back to you.

“Skilled was he in sports and pastimes,
In the merry dance of snow shoes,
In the play of quoits and ball play;
Skilled was he in games of hazard,
In all games of skill and hazard,
Pugasing, the Bowl and Counters,
Kuntassor, the Game of Plum Stones.”
Hiawatha.

When the braves and squaws have grown hungry, the kettle of steaming “venison” should be brought in, and the whole tribe sits down around it. It is not really venison, but stewed chicken, which the “tribe” probably prefers to venison, and with it are passed hot cornbread and ears of corn. Berries may be served in birch bark dishes, and little birch bark canoes are good for souvenirs.

The Braves and the Squaws.

After supper the whole tribe should take part in an Indian war dance about a camp fire, and then, having said farewell to Hiawatha and Minnehaha, return along the trail, each to his own tepee.