Blog Hop and Haunting Flashback Friday

If you're here for Jo's Halloween Blog Hop, let me apologize for forgetting about you! I'm just coming off a couple of giant projects at work. In fact, I finished one yesterday and one on Wednesday.

You can probably guess from all that busy busi-ness (and my lack of SAL post on Wednesday) that I haven't been stitching much. So this flashback Friday from 2010 is my most favorite Halloween piece, Birds of a Feather's Scared Silly. I did manage to take it out of storage at the beginning of the month and hang it.

From here, you're heading to see Hazel. Good luck!

For those of you who said, hey, it's Friday, I wonder what was going on a hundred or so years ago in women's magazines. I have been looking for some news of Hallowe'ens of long ago, but as with all things this holiday has evolved. The search engines tell me there is nothing of Halloween in the nineteenth century magazines. It was of course, known since the late 1500s. Robert Burns wrote a poem about it in 1786 and in 1864 a book of days referenced "The evening of the 31st of October" as a "night set apart for a universal walking abroad of spirits." But "21 Quick and Easy Costumes to Wear to Work" and Sexy [fill in the blank] Costumes were years in the future.

I did finally find something I found tremendously frightening in Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, October 1846; 33, 187. Ironically it is from the Dead Letter Office; this letter was presented without comment. I do wonder how it was received back then.

I am a great admirer of beauty, therefore she must be pretty. Elegance of manner and good temper are of course indispensable. I would not for the world marry a learned lady, yet I would like her to know enough to follow any conversation I might wish to lead--that is, to know enough to appreciate and respect my acquirements. Science I absolutely prohibit, though I should blush if, like Tom Burns' smiling idiot of a wife, she were to ask in a company, "what became of all the old moons?"

You know I have been a great deal in the gay world, so much that I am sick of it. Public places are my aversion; I wish, then, to marry a young lady who must be so attached to me that she will wish never to pass an evening out. Our own fireside must be our Paradise, for I would give nothing for a wife whose happiness would be found away from her husband. I expect exclusive devotion, a brow ever serene, and a heart full of love always. Money, of course, is desirable, but I would be satisfied with a small portion from a woman very beautiful and very much in love with me.

The soul of romantic passion I require is seldom found but in fresh, unsophisticated hearts; it is a sine qua non, therefore, that she be under twenty. You may at first call this a disparity, but I assure you I shall not be fifty until my next birthday: then I am as young as ever in my feelings, and you have not seen me in my new wig, which really takes ten years from my appearance. If I can find an intelligent, amiable, beautiful, graceful young creature, who will give me her whole heart, and yield a sweet, unwavering compliance to all my moods, all my wishes, I think we will enjoy a domestic bliss to be envied by all the gay and fashionable.

I live in horror that he found such a one. Pleasant dreams and Happy Halloween!