These odd Victorian Christmas parlor games look fun and potentially quite dangerous

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Originally published at: These odd Victorian Christmas parlor games look fun and potentially quite dangerous | Boing Boing

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I’m aghast at this behavior.

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There’s an Agatha Christie story (and an accompanying Poirot episode) about snapdragon. They transpose it to Halloween but it was absolutely a Christmas tradition back in the day.

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In our current plague times, I find that game especially unappetizing. But we played blind man’s bluff all the time growing up. It’s fun!

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The first rule of blindman’s buff is to play only where there are soft pianofortes.

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A recent study determined that only one company produced especially soft pianoforte’s and they quickly went out of business.

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When you all ran a similar blurb last year, we tried this one out at home. It was pretty fun! The alcohol flames really aren’t all that hot, really.

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That’s how Tiny Tim was maimed in the first place.

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Indeed. Snapdragon is even mentioned in the Washington Irving story Christmas Eve, originally published in the same collection as The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow.

I kind of want that to be why Christie put it in a Halloween story but I know it’s unlikely

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Or even pianissimos.

Did you go for the authentic Victorian experience, with flowing floor-length gowns and open fireplaces?

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Ha! More like unvented space heaters and manufactured housing with hallways so narrow we could shimmy up them in our iron-on-patched jeans, but otherwise, pretty much the same.
(Goddess’ praise to all those suffragettes who came before, that I could grow up wearing pants if I wanted to!)

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I’m amused how some of those games, especially “Hot Cockles” are similar to games we’ve played at kink events, but we don’t have to pretend about any aspects of it! (I almost hurt myself laughing over the description of that one, especially when my nesting partner started describing the potential origins of it: “No, no we weren’t in a group doing something untoward with head in John’s lap while Mary kicked me in the bum. We were … um … playing a game! That’s it. Here, Mary will be happy to explain the rules to you, as she’s the one that suggested it.”

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Salvador Dalí was inordinately fond of their work, and collected all the pianodolces he could find.

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Ahh yes, I remember now, used to hang his watches from them. Such a silly boy.

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