STUFF AND NONSENSE

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 313, 19 December 1936, Page 4

STUFF AND NONSENSE

CHRISTMAS REFLECTIONS

Some Valuable Tips for Games, Riddles, and Distressed Parents. After years of intensive research into the phenomena of Xmas (Give Her a Traction Engine!) I have at last found out what it is. * * * The season of geese and poodwill, do you suggest? No.

A time for the remembering of old friends who borrowed a fiver in 1887? Possibly. A time for family reunions? Ugh! \ •' * * * Christmas indeed may be any of these; but is it not the Xmas dinner, and the Xmas bon-bons and the merry Xmas games such as riddles and diddles, hunt-the-thimble and blind- * man’s-duff, kiss-inthe-ring and murder j that really give the season its uniqu fascination? * * * Christmas is the time of food and folly, a riot for the plum duffers and the plum crazy, (Give Him A Rolls Royce!) and w-ho, after seeing little Willie carried off groaning and creaking to be ill in the green-house, and after seeing maiden Aunt Ermyntrude (Give Her A Nut!}’ dancing on the table with a paper hat on her head and a penny-squeaker firmly wedged in her false teeth to amuse the children, will not agree with me that I have really discovered at last what Christmas is: Christmas is all stuff and nonsense!

***** Xmas Antics. But be it from me to cast a bionket of gleam, I mean a blanket of gloom, over this most festive of seasons. I could even suggest some jolly little games for a children’s Xmas party. * * * An awfully amusing little game to play is Charades, which is played hy dressing Aunt Ermyntrude as Henry the Eighth, or, alternatively, undressing her as Boadicea, and then in either case chopping her to pieces to see whether she is animal, vegetable or mineral. If she is not, she wins. * * * Then there is Lido, a fascinating beach game played in pyjamas, and snakes-and-ladders, which consists of purchasing four adders and a dentipede and letting them run up Aunt Ermyntrude’s stockings.

* , * t* Hopskotch and Butterscotch are played by ordinary Sketch on New Year’s Eve. As the Skotch are practically naked except for their gaudy haggises, and as the bagpipes (or bugpipes, as they pronounce it) are played, these games are not suitable for general exhibition. (Give Her A Platypus!) * * * Hide-and-seek is another jolly game, performed by everybody going off in couples and kissing in the coalscuttle. * * * For despairing fathers, nothing more suitable than Follow-the-Leader can be suggested. After explaining to the children that they must follow your every action implicitly, do what you do and don’t do what you don’t, you lead off in a merry rush that takes you under Aunt Ermyntrude’s bed, onto the roof, down to the cellar (time for a quick one), out into the garden, up the gooseberry bush and down the well, along the clothesline (Father Would Like A Golliwog) till finally (Mother Would Like Herr Hitler) you reach the duckpond, where, with the merry throng behind you, you plunge out over your depth and don't swim.

■56 * * Riddle-me-really. No true Xmas number is complete without a few good jokes and riddles, but unfortunately we only know one joke and that is about Little Audrey and the man with the wooden leg, and that, though we giggled and laughed, is not really what you would call a very good joke. (A Present For Hubby—Give Him Beans’/) * * * However, here is a riddle for young and old: If any national integral function of x divided by X minus A until the remainder no longer contains Xmas, how the deuce did you manage to pass matric? ♦ • • An easier one for the tiny tots is contained in the following little rhyme composed by my little friend Pansy Bloggins with a teeny weeny pencil on a nearly imaginary piece of paper: If I were going to St. Ives Accompanied by 7 wives And every wife had 7 brats And talked aloud through 7 hats, How many pints of Stephens Ink Would satisfy my need for drink?

Tailpiece. Answers to both questions will be supplied to candidates who send in their birth certificates and five shil lings. Candidates are warned not to write on either side of the paper. And now children. “Lancet,” who is going to the South Pole to be married to an igloo, takes this opportunity of wishing 1 his wide and astonishing circle of readers as merry a Christmas as they deserve, (Don’t Forget Grandpa—Give Him A Bath!)