Parlour Games

To add to your collection of festive writerly games, decor, and joyous silliness, I have a lovely new brace of parlour games for you, perfect for large groups. One of them is ideally suited to us of a literary disposition (but equally enjoyable for those who aren't!) and the other is really just a matter of joyous chaos. We tried them both at my birthday party last week and they worked even better than I'd hoped. Let the games begin!

Poem Enactments

This is best with a really good-sized group, at least ten people, ideally more. You'll also need enough space for people to sit around the edge and leave the centre of the room clear. 

Anyone can read or recite a poem. Before they do, though, they assign people to act out the parts. (Or ask for volunteers.) It's very important to cast before reading. 

While they read / recite the poem, the actors play their parts, following whatever directions come their way. I did The Walrus and the Carpenter, casting a sun, moon, walrus, carpenter, oldest oyster, and all the other oysters. My brother in law, as the sun, did a truly majestic job of trying to make the billows smooth and bright. My sister, as the moon, was splendidly sulky about it. The sight of most of my friends fervently pretending to be oysters, trotting behind the walrus and the carpenter, will live with me forever. Especially when they started making oyster noises. 

In someone else's poem, I volunteered to be the pond. It turned out the poem was Daddy Fell Into the Pond, so I got heftily landed on! In The Owl and the Pussycat, many of us were bong trees. When someone else did The Jabberwocky, Gwendi (the Jabberwock) collapsed to the floor in death so dramatically that the thunk was audible.

Nursery rhymes, picture books, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes, and Doctor Seuss are all great contenders for poems, as well as dramatic ballads like The Highwayman.

* 

The (Brief) Singing Of Many Songs

Everyone needs to be briefed to think of their favourite song to sing. A hymn, a carol, a pop song, a protest song, a lullaby, a folk song, whatever they know and is dear to their hearts.

Before The Singing, everyone firmly fixes their song in their mind, and lightly hums the opening note. Then everyone sings, all at once, for two minutes, and may the loudest voice win!

We didn't have a prize, but we totally should have, and the winner was 100% my sister with her passionate rendition of Toto's Africa, drowning out even her husband's and Will's combined Jerusalem. Glorious! Half the cacophonous choir collapsed in giggles after the first minute, but the remaining roar was still award-worthy.

*

And if you want more silly or writerly festive things to do, I've got heaps more for you already up on the blog:

• Four Writerly Party Games (these work well with 4+ people)
• Zoom Party Games (the same four games plus two extra, all converted for playing over Zoom)
• The Present Game, for a chaotic and increasingly random present exchange
• How To Make a Christmas Star, which you can do on your own as paperly decor or as a group with everyone contributing spokes to the star
• How to Fold a Little Book, if you want to fill your Christmas tree with tiny books (You could use richly decorated Christmas paper so they look even more splendid.)

Wishing you wonderful, creative, silly fun! 

---

Looking for present ideas? Get a gift voucher for courses, workshops, resources, or support, from £15 to £345.

Creative play: folding a little book

Make a tiny folded book out of a single piece of paper, with no stitching at all – just a magic bit of folding. These tiny books inspire all sorts of uses: writing flash fiction, a series of haiku, a week of daily doodles or tiny poems, pretty to-do lists for a particular week or as a regular reuseable reminder, and if you turn them inside out, they become a dual perspective on something, or a secret story underlying a story. You can also use them to decorate your Christmas tree!

The video shows you how to make them and the written instructions are underneath.

How to make a little folded book

Some people prefer written instructions, but for this one watching the video is going to be much easier! When my mum first taught me these, she tried to explain it to me over the phone and I nearly lost my mind with bewilderment before we had the bright idea of switching to video. So if you're struggling to follow the instructions... switch to the video above.

You'll need... an A4 piece of paper; scissors.

• fold the paper in half vertically, then open it up
• fold the paper in half horizontally, then open it up
• turn the paper over
• fold the short sides into the middle fold, then open it up
• fold the paper in half on the short middle fold and cut horizontally to the first set of folds
• open your paper and gently tug on either side of the cut to open it like a mouth
• as you pull, the folds you made earlier will slide into place to create a star shape with four spokes - those are your pages
• sharpen all the creases
• fold all the pages onto one side and press down to sharpen the creases some more

Creative play: sewing a little book

The second little creative-play video is how to handsew a little book – a very useful skill for whisking together a little book and another creatively soothing thing to do. I'm inviting students on the Creative Play workshop on 2 August to make a little blank book as optional prep for the workshop, and it's a lovely thing for any writer to be able to do. For the workshop, we'll be using just two sheets of paper folded over. You can use as many as you like, up to about 8 sheets of paper. (More than that gets tricky to fold and to cut through.) The video shows you how and instructions are beneath, for those who prefer that.

How to sew a little book

You will need... paper; a needle; thread; scissors.

• Fold your paper in half, and pierce five holes along the spine, evenly spaced. (If you have a thicker stack of paper, you can push your needle's eye into a cork, to create a makeshift awl.) 
• Measure the thread twice the length of the spine plus a bit extra for tying. 
• Thread your needle and push through the middle hole, leaving a small length of thread sticking out for tying with later. 
• On the outside of the spine, go up to the next hole and back through, then on the inside up to the top hole and back through. 
• Repeat in the reverse order to go back down the booklet, to the middle, and repeat on the bottom half.
• Finally, tie the two pieces of thread together, either with a knot or a bow. The tied bit of the book can go on the outside or the inside.

Creative play: Making "parchment"

The more seriously we take our writing, the more we can forget how much it relies on play – that our inventiveness has its roots in playfulness, even silliness. Taking a little time out to play can inspire us with new ideas, relax and calm us, and help us write in new ways. I can pretty much guarantee that you'll write differently on your own handmade "parchment" to how you would in your usual notebook or Word doc! For the Creative Play workshop, I'm sending my students some fun, silly, and creative things to do as optional prep, and I thought I'd share them here.

First up is making "parchment", for all your wizardly, monsastic, piratical, or historical needs. The video shows you exactly how; if you prefer written instructions, they're underneath it. And I can personally vouch for how calming it is: the ten minutes I spent making my parchment and trying it out left me feeling more relaxed than I had all week!

How to make "parchment"

You will need...

• a teabag and hot water
• plain white paper
• optional seasalt flakes
• any props that help you get into the mood (I gathered up a candle, my pirate chests, and a small orrery)

Prepare the tea "paint" by soaking the teabag in half a cup of boiling water and leaving it to cool. Once it's completely cooled, you can use the teabag as your "paintbrush" to spread the tea over the paper. Make sure you're on a surface that won't suffer from tea stains – the kitchen counter rather than a wooden table! You can get different effects by crumpling the paper before you tea-stain it (it makes the crumpled lines darker), scattering salt onto the tea-stained paper (it creates lighter patches where the salt falls), and scattering tea-leaves from the bag onto the tea-stained paper (it creates darker patches where that falls). When you've tea-stained it, put it somewhere to dry, held down with rocks / coasters / mugs to keep it from blowing away. When it's completely dried, it takes all kinds of ink well, without bleeding or scratching the pen nib. I tested it with my fountain pen, a gel pen, and a Sharpie, which all worked beautifully. And then you can discover what kinds of things you write when you're writing on your very own parchment.