All's Well that Ends Well

My Alice in Wonderland theme birthday party came and went and everyone seemed to have a great time. It started with the invitations up above, and on the day of the party as the guests came up the sidewalk to my door they were greeted by the White Rabbit playing in our rare April snow. 
  

After opening the door (above) guests found me wearing this silly headband, which I hope distracted from the fact that I hadn't been able to wash my hair for three days because I lost my hot water heater during the ice storm. It was so comfortable I forgot I was wearing it when later I took my dog outside for a potty break. God only knows what the neighbors thought!

One of the first things the ladies saw coming in the door was this floral arrangement that my niece sent me for my birthday. And after everyone got here we did a little Q & A involving the scrolls below.

In an email before party day I had sent the guests---my Gathering Girls group---a list of three questions with the instructions that they’d have to know the answer to one of them to get in the door. The questions were: 1) who made the tarts in the ‘Alice’ book; or 2) what was the key used for; or 3) what did the flamingos and hedgehogs do in the book? I had a method to my madness---no pun intended. Mad Hatter, get it? One lady found answers for all three questions and she didn't have to take a scroll. One forgot to look, another had an answer but it was wrong. Both had to take a scroll. The scrolls were just a fun way to assign tasks to do at the party: 1) to help carry the food from the refrigerator to the dining room; 2) to pour the drinks to toast 'friendship'; 3) to help plate the cake and ice cream; and 4) to help make and serve the tea with dessert.

Can you believe it, I totally forgot to take pictures of the food---well, of anything on party day! I had planned to do it when all the food was sitting on my Hoosier cabinet before it was passed around. My camera was sitting only two feet away, how could I forget! I served two kinds of tea sandwiches (tuna and a cream cheese with cucumber and spinach), potato salad, a cucumber salad and a marinated four bean salad plus trays of cheeses, olives, pickles, red tarts and one of my friends brought dill pickles rolled up with cream cheese and ham. The tray of olives was a joke for one of the ladies who says when she goes out with her family she steals all the black olives off their salads. I had tiny flags marking the black olives "Sue's" and the green ones "Everyone Else's." She got a kick out of it and wanted to take the flags home to show her family. There were a few other flags here and there proclaiming, "Eat Me!" as per the story-line in the 'Alice' book.

The photos below were taken the day before the party and in some cases they don't show the finished version. The first one is a place setting, for example, that is minus a key at the top of the plate. The dessert cups on the left were filled with the four bean salad, the ones on the right were for the water and champagne. I've loved my moss green thumbprint Fenton luncheon set since the '60s when I first started buying the pieces. But it's been so long since I've used them that they all had to be washed before the party as well as afterward. So worth the effort for sentimental me!

My centerpiece is not impressive in photos but in person where you could absorb the details and symbolism from Alice in Wonderland I think it worked nicely. (My friends seems to enjoy it.) It only cost me the price of a deck of cards, some glass bottles (both from Amazon, both cheap), tags from Hobby Lobby and the flamingos are from the dollar store. The rest I had around the house. 

 

I love these tiny bottles. In the book Alice drank a potion from bottles like these to make her grow smaller so she could fit through the small door the key unlocked to the garden. Mine just held pink lemonade.

I broke the minute hand on this pocket watch from my husband's collection trying to set it to rabbit time---2:30. (The rabbit's watch stopped but at different times in the Disney movie and the original book.) The rabbit is three inches tall, handmade and I bought him years ago at a teddy bear convention. Before my husband's stroke I was teaching myself how to make designer teddy bears. The smallest one I ever accomplished making was a six inch, jointed bear with a silly looking neck.

 

The little scrolls (in an upside down candle holder) contained seven life lessons that the 'Alice' book teaches. (I wrote about the lessons in any earlier blog.) I think/hope everyone enjoyed their positive messages and the bit of conversation they triggered. I was kind of shocked that some of the ladies had such expressive voices for reading out loud, no doubt honed over years of reading to grandchildren. I messed up my reading and I'd read all the lessons more than once while I was making them.

The one inch cake and the chair are from my dollhouse (and represent the time when Alice was big and the cake was too tiny to share). The Cheshire Cat card was not in my centerpiece but the branches with the ribbon you saw in the photo five up above represents the tree in Oxford where the cat was known to sit, a real cat and tree that Lewis Carroll wrote into the book. The Dodo in the story was based on the author himself who was a stutterer like Dodo. Another interesting fact: Alice in Wonderland has never gone out of print since it was written in 1865 and it's been translated into 176 languages.

The circle of playing cards grounds the other stuff and are copies of the vintage art work in the book. In the center of the cards is a cake plate to give height to the second tier of things.

The photo above shows the table without the water glasses and bean cups or the keys at each place setting. I wish I had remembered to take a photo of the table with all my Fenton on it. You'll have to take my word for it that the table sparkled in the sun coming through the windows. And I didn't get a single picture of my oak table in the kitchen where I had a red velvet cake, my mother's lily-of-valley tea cups and a small tray of cookies set up. (The cookies were just the king and queen cookies sorted out of two bags of Pepperidge Farm Chessman---lots of leftovers for me to eat.) The cups and saucers are in the dishwasher now but the photo below will give you an idea of the colors and dishes on the cake table. The dishes were supermarket premiums back when I was growing up and when I downsized my everyday dishes---heavy restaurant ware from the 40's---I went on e-Bay and China Replacement to fill out what was missing from Mom's lily-of-the-valley set to build a service for six. Seemed only right since my brother and I broke most of Mom's prized set. She had a thing for lily-of-the-valleys---wore the perfume, had the flowers in the yard and picked them in the spring. My brother, nieces and I have all transplanted some of Mom's lilies to where we currently live.

The party started at 12:00 and ended around 4:00. Toasting to friendship and my birthday, those us who could have alcohol with our medications polished off a bottle of champagne and those who couldn't, polished off a bottle of sparkling white grape juice. Hey, it just dawned on me that we didn't sing Happy Birthday! But we all laughed and shared a lot and no one person monopolized the conversation. The thing I looked forward to the most was letting the ladies wander through my house and see my collectables and art work and they seemed to enjoy that. I think it helps friends to bond and understand one another if we see each other in our natural habitat, so to speak---what we treasure and surround ourselves with. (And I often feel misunderstood.) I had a great time planning the party and it sure kept my mind focused on the here and now and not the six sadiversaries April usually brings.

And to my best friend since kindergarten who lives far away and answered my endless email questions about food and menus, these balloons are for you. You kept telling me I couldn't have a birthday party without balloons and one of my Gathering Girls pals must have heard you because she was the first to arrive and she was carrying these.....

"All's well that ends well" is a phrase that's been around since 1604 when Shakespeare wrote a play by that name. My party is a perfect example of how that sentiment is still as true today as it was when he gave those words to the world. ©
 

Crisis Averted and Other News from Party Central

The house got cleaned for the party I WAS going to have on Monday---more on that later---and the carpet cleaners showed up and I got all the furniture back where it belongs. Then all the electrical outlets in my kitchen quit working and I had to add going to a funeral visitation into my planning schedule this week. The person who died was the father of the son-I-wish-I-had so I couldn’t not go to give my condolences in person. I didn’t know the father well but I know his son and grandkids quite well, been to all the special occasions in their lives for the past forty-eight years. The son-I-wish-I-had is very religious and is comforted by his belief that he and his dad will meet up again in heaven. The heaven-theory doesn’t work for me but I’m glad it works for these people I care about. It gives them a sense of peace---that it's not over when it's over---and that’s all that’s important when grieving. Whatever works, works.

When you’re having a party it’s kind of important to have working outlets in your kitchen and the gods of things that can go wrong were working overtime to come up with this snafu. I tried the reset button on an AFCI/GFCI outlet plug in the kitchen but it wouldn’t budget and I checked the circuit breaker box in the garage but I couldn’t see any changes in there. Failing the limits of handyman skills involving electrical problems I called my brother and left a message saying I needed to talk to him sooner rather than later. 

I didn’t know my brother was down in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two stepsons and, he said, they were dragging him from bar to bar. He sounded like he was buzzed but he used to do a lot of electrical work so I was still hopeful my brother could help. Long story short the AFCI/GFCI buttons are designed not to work if the power isn’t coming to the line and he told me to go back out to the garage to look at the circuit breaker box in the morning when I could see it better and sure enough when I was standing in front of it a second time with good light I could see the little red square on the switch marked ‘kitchen.’ As per instructed in our phone conversation I pushed it right then left and went back to the kitchen to test the outlets. One worked the rest didn’t. Oops! I had forgotten my brother had also told me I might have to reset the reset button on the AFCI outlet as well as the breaker switch. My brother had asked me what I had plugged into the line and I told him that the last thing I had plugged in was a nightlight that made a poofing sound and turned the bulb black inside. “That’s enough to kick the circuit breaker," he said, “they're designed to be sensitive to keep you from getting shocked. Throw that damn nightlight out!” Which all goes to prove that a person with a good buzz on can still give great advice. Crisis averted. 

Another crisis I averted was accomplished when I decided I’d better figure out which knife in my arsenal would cut the crusts off tea sandwiches the best. Can you believe it, in my entire life this week is the first time I’ve ever tried doing that! I did find instructions online---don’t laugh because I learned about putting the bread in the freezer until firm. I had to experiment with timing the “until firm” part and I went through six knives before finding the perfect one. I felt like I’d just planted a flag on Mount Kilimanjaro; I even woke up the dog when I yelled out, “Yes!” when I had cut four perfectly square tea sandwiches. He was a happy camper, though, because Levi got to eat the crusts and filling that fell out of my experiment. 

 And then Mother Nature decided that since nothing else has worked to throw me off my party game she'd give it a try. The weather people started warning us about a "major ice storm" coming our way starting Friday night through Sunday night with snow on top of it for Monday. I have a driveway with a hill that's not safe for man or beast under those conditions, not to mention older women who could break their hips. So I called everyone to reschedule the party and, thankfully, everyone can come on Wednesday. I also reworked my menu to recipes that didn't require any last minute shopping, then I ran out to shop before it got hairy on the roads. Moving the party was the right thing to do for everyone involved. When the weather people talk about ice thick enough to bring power lines and tress down, you take it seriously.

My husband’s and my birthdays, our anniversary, the sadiversary of my mom’s death and my parent’s anniversary all fall in the first half of April and in past years they have collectively brought me down. But this year, with my birthday party planning to distract me---the first in many decades---I didn’t feel the punches of depression trying to beat the stuffing out of me. I haven't had the time for that!  ©