From John O’London’s Weekly (early last century)... For the Christmas Party Some New and Old Ways of Entertaining Your Friends. Compiled by “Tantalus”
	The jolliest games are the noisiest.  The newest of these is “dog-racing” - at least the title is new.  You thread a long piece of string through a hole in a stout piece of cardboard, attach the string at one end, and, holding the other end in your hand, jerk the card towards you down a slightly inclined plane.  The sporting possibilities of the game are considerable! A different kind of game, but perhaps a more generally amusing one, is that in which one member of the party is called upon to make a speech.  When he puts out his right hand, you all have to shout “Hear, Hear”, when he puts out his left, you cry “No, No”, and when he puts his hand above his head, you clap your hands.  The one who says or does the wrong thing takes the place of the speaker.  Begin your speech slowly; when you speed up you will soon catch your victim. But after “Laughter has been holding both his sides”, we come back to the quieter paper and pencil games.  Party games must, of course, be “round games”, for, as A.A. Milne has pointed out, games for two at this period of the year are played only under the mistletoe. Have you played “lists”? The party decides on ten groups of things, say, fruit, clothing, books, instruments of torture, and such like, and we all write them down.  Then a letter is chosen at random, and you are given a few minutes to write opposite each group the name of a member of it beginning with the chosen letter.  Then the party forms itself into a jury to weigh up the lists.  You get a mark for each word approved by the jury, and three marks if no one else has thought of that particular one.  That is when the fun begins. I remember that, on one occasion, the group was “furniture” and the letter “w”.  For the life of me I could not think of “what-not” or “windsor-chair”, and so I wrote down “whiskers”, pleading that you cold be “furnished with whiskers”.  And the foreman of the jury showed the largeness of his soul by allowing me three marks because “whiskers were sometimes known as side-boards”! Filling the gaps A similar kind of game is one in which you choose a short word, and write it downwards and upwards.  For instance, if you decide on “crest”, you will write it this:-  C.........T  R.........S  E.........E  S.........R  T.........C Next you make words beginning and ending with these letters, and, when all are complete, you give a definition - a fairly loose one - of each word you have written.  The first to guess the word scores a point.  If no one guesses you score.  Suppose your definition for the first word in the above were “something to do with music”, your fellow-players might suggest “concert” and “chant”, but they would probably fail to guess “counter-point”, which you had been astute enough to write.  So you score a well-earned point!