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Snap-dragon (game) was one of the Sports and recreation good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||||||
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Did you know?" column on
October 16, 2005. The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that the
Victorian
parlour game of
Snap-dragon involved children plucking
raisins out of burning
brandy and eating them? | |||||||||||||
Current status: Delisted good article |
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why is scotland specified in the opening paragraph as one of the countries it didn't spread to, is there some signifigance
A minor point, but I feel the word would be better spelt without the hyphen, which makes it look oddly pedantic and old-fashioned. In modern English it's bound to be more common without. I'd also suggest it should be shown at Flapdragon with the other forms redirecting there, since I've much more often seen it called that than snapdragon, but then perhaps I'm biased! Flapdragon 01:27, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
It's not clear what the basis is for the claim that this is a children's game. Grose says that "the company scramble for the raisins". It might be faintly silly or childish, but there's nothing in the article or any definitions I've seem to show that it's played only or mainly by children, let alone unsupervised, as the term "children's game" would seem to imply -- makes me think of marbles or or hopscotch or some such. After all, it does involve strong drink and naked flame! Flapdragon 01:16, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Also, I'm not convinced of the hard-and-fast division the article currently implies between the "children's game" involving swallowing burning raisins (etc) on the one hand, and the "drinking game" involving drinking while avoiding a flame. To my mind they're both just variations on messing around with spirits and flames. After all, the brandy in the bowl was surely drunk at the end of the game with the raisins, and presumably not by children. I think the players are sometimes described as snatching the raisins directly with their mouths, as the dragon is doing in the picture; while this would seem difficult (as well as dangerous) if not improbable, it blurs the boundaries between the "children's" and "drinking" games.
Finally (and this is getting really picky, but) in "children often burnt their hands or mouths playing this game (Strutt, 1903), which led to the practice dying out in the early 20th century" can we be sure of a causal relationship? Who knows why the game really died out? OK, enough nitpicking for now. Flapdragon 02:02, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
hm, so is the idea here that the "snatching" is done with the mouth, meaning you have to plunge your head into the flames, or may you use your hands? 09:07, 14 October 2005 (UTC)~
The "children" bit has made its way to the Main Page today. I find the connection spurious. The article cites the Strutt reference for this, but the actual content of the reference [1] only uses the phrase "the young people of both sexes". To me this is much more likely to indicate late teens or early 20s; the age around which young adults are given the freedom to do stupid daring things to themselves. The fact that it particularly mentions "of both sexes" suggests that it was a young people's liquored-up party game. Something akin to, say, beer-shooting. It's also worth noting that the Strutt doc mentions "burning their hands", meaning that this is not a daredevil's bobbing-for-apples game; hands were used to pick out the raisins, which were plenty hot (and stickily juicy), enough to scald the mouth once broken open during eating. - Keith D. Tyler ¶ 18:12, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Well not entirely.... My family still play this from time to time, mostly around Christmas and New Year (and we call it snapdragon). Anyone managing to transport a still-burning raisin to their mouth gets an admiring reaction (it's not easy to do). I'm pleased to say that we have had no incidences of burn injuries! 88.110.106.224 11:08, 14 October 2005 (UTC)Claire PS We use fingers to pick the raisins out - use of the mouth would surely be injurious to hairstyles let alone anything else... Further, the whole family play and I can remember doing so (with some trepidation) as a fairly small child - I'd call it a "family game" 88.110.106.224 11:13, 14 October 2005 (UTC)Claire
I played this game as a child when visiting my grandparents who were born in the US but who both had English parents. We called the game "Raisin Snatch" and it was played at Christmas after dinner. Grandmother heated up a large heatproof platter and plumped the raisins in hot water. The drained raisins were spread on the hot platter and then brandy was poured over the raisins. The lights were turned out and my grandpa would carry the platter to the table with the raisins in flames. The goal was to snatch all of the raisins off the platter before the flames went out. The alcohol flame was not all that hot but it was still exciting and scary to stick your hands in the flames and try to get the raisins in your mouth before the flames went out. I've introduced my children to this game and hope they will carry the tradition on into the future. On several Christmases I have been on vacation and have introduced this game to my fellow travelers in Nepal and Peru. I always assumed the game had some relationship to the English flaming Plum Pudding. Making a plum pudding is alot of work so I imagined someone proclaiming, "Skip the pudding, let's just flame the raisins!" By the way, in my family, there was no drinking of the brandy, and the alcohol burned off leaving just the taste of the liquor. My grandmother, a staunch Methodist, would not have allowed us to play this game if she thought we were actually drinking alcohol. 24.5.152.132 ( talk) 06:18, 2 December 2008 (UTC)deanna statler
My family has played this continuously through the generations, and still continues to. We came out of Sheffield area in England, and have since spread to Canada and the US. I glad to hear others still know what it is to stir up the fire and eat hot raisins. We are told a wish would come true if we got the raisins into our mouths still flaming. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flatcan ( talk • contribs) 23:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I can concur with the above. My family has also played this game and still does. Since the 1950s I personally have played it on Christmas Eve in the Great Hall at Kincardine Castle in Scotland's Royal Deeside. In the early days the only light was from the log fire and the flaming brandy as the Christmas Tree was only lit by candles and thus the lit tree was a rather brief one-off event. We had to make sure the raisins were still flaming when they went into our mouths and as children were told we must eat at least twelve in this way to ensure we had 12 lucky months ahead of us. We kept eating until the flames died out and by then the brandy wasn't worth drinking as the alcohol had burned off. Even as children we worked that one out pretty quickly. We last played the game on 24th December 2011. 86.141.110.19 ( talk) 17:00, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
In another tradition, one of the raisins contains a gold button and becomes 'the lucky raisin'.
A raisin containing a button? Come on! Is that physically possible? Anyway, did people really have gold buttons? Perhaps the writer meant gold-coloured. Flapdragon 17:04, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
We always use quite large raisins - I think they're muscat? Not sure. I think this is because normal-size ones would be quite hard to pick up fast enough. Anyhow, I think they would be large enough to put a small button inside. 88.110.106.224 23:05, 14 October 2005 (UTC)Claire
I deleted the "English" bit in an earlier edit (I should really have said so) because there didn't seem to be any evidence that the game wasn't played outside England, which on the face of it looked unlikely; the timeframe then given ("Georgian and Victorian") was excessively restrictive and given that the same might be true of the geographical restriction, it seemed safer not to specify a country. I considered changing it to "British" but that would just have been guesswork. However, it does seem unlikely that the game was not played elsewhere. The only light I can shed is that the entry for snapdragon in Harrap's New Standard French and English Dictionary (first published 1939, this from the 1980 edition) is "jeu (de Noël) qui consiste à happer des raisins sec dans du cognac flambant et à les manger touts chauds" [(Christmas) game consisting of grabbing raisins out of burning brandy and eating them hot]. Though this doesn't prove the game was unknown in France, it shows at least that the editors were unable to find a French translation. In the absence of reliable info, I'd say it's probably better to leave the geography unspecified. Flapdragon 19:21, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Maybe the simplest approach would be to leave an unspoken implication that it is British, and mention the interesting point made by Chambers (a Scottish publisher, so they should know!)? Otherwise we'd get horribly bogged down in questions of exactly which bits of the UK practised it. Actually I could believe that it was just England: Wales has different (cheaper!) Christmas customs, and perhaps Scotland would disapprove of such profligacy with expensive foreign liquor?! Flapdragon 20:38, 14 October 2005 (UTC) Still practiced, growing up third-generation Canadian, and now my kids, raised in the States, practice it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flatcan ( talk • contribs) 23:38, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I thought snap-dragons were a flower. If not, what are those flowers called that people have been calling "Snap-dragons"?-- Redandready 16:07, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
I remember calling the antirrhinum flower a 'snap-dragon' or 'bunny-rabbit' as a kid (back in the 1950s). I think the 'bunny-rabbit' name I learned from my grand-mother N790 ( talk) 10:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I think it would help if this section was rearranged, or if reference was made to the drinking version of the game earlier on. As it stands, the literary quotations don't make sense until one has read on to the description of the old version of the game. Melaena ( talk) 11:15, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
Just popped in to note that the "first printed mention" sections are derived from the OED - uncited, but not original research. which may have led to the practice mostly dying out in the early 20th century is speculation and should be removed. I'm no longer actively editing, but if someone else wants to pick up the ball here I'd welcome it.
Ziggurat 03:12, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
Although I'm not quite brave enough to use fingers, I can confirm that this is still a fun game to play using metal forks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.171.29 ( talk) 01:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
The last sentence in the first paragraph struck me as peculiar, and potentially out of place. Is the "Cameron Clan" somehow notable? (Do they have their own wiki article I may be missing?). Is there annual event well documented previously that a citation could be included? Thanks for the interesting content though! Cheers! -- Elfabet ( talk) 18:27, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
.. or rather a tradition of eating? There seems to be no rules, no winner, no play, only an effort to eat. If it is otherwise, please clarify it somewhere in the article. (for a definition of what consists a game on can also refer to Game )
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Snap-dragon (game) article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Snap-dragon (game) was one of the Sports and recreation good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's
Main Page in the "
Did you know?" column on
October 16, 2005. The text of the entry was: Did you know ...that the
Victorian
parlour game of
Snap-dragon involved children plucking
raisins out of burning
brandy and eating them? | |||||||||||||
Current status: Delisted good article |
This article is rated B-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||
|
Daily pageviews of this article
A graph should have been displayed here but
graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at
pageviews.wmcloud.org |
why is scotland specified in the opening paragraph as one of the countries it didn't spread to, is there some signifigance
A minor point, but I feel the word would be better spelt without the hyphen, which makes it look oddly pedantic and old-fashioned. In modern English it's bound to be more common without. I'd also suggest it should be shown at Flapdragon with the other forms redirecting there, since I've much more often seen it called that than snapdragon, but then perhaps I'm biased! Flapdragon 01:27, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
It's not clear what the basis is for the claim that this is a children's game. Grose says that "the company scramble for the raisins". It might be faintly silly or childish, but there's nothing in the article or any definitions I've seem to show that it's played only or mainly by children, let alone unsupervised, as the term "children's game" would seem to imply -- makes me think of marbles or or hopscotch or some such. After all, it does involve strong drink and naked flame! Flapdragon 01:16, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Also, I'm not convinced of the hard-and-fast division the article currently implies between the "children's game" involving swallowing burning raisins (etc) on the one hand, and the "drinking game" involving drinking while avoiding a flame. To my mind they're both just variations on messing around with spirits and flames. After all, the brandy in the bowl was surely drunk at the end of the game with the raisins, and presumably not by children. I think the players are sometimes described as snatching the raisins directly with their mouths, as the dragon is doing in the picture; while this would seem difficult (as well as dangerous) if not improbable, it blurs the boundaries between the "children's" and "drinking" games.
Finally (and this is getting really picky, but) in "children often burnt their hands or mouths playing this game (Strutt, 1903), which led to the practice dying out in the early 20th century" can we be sure of a causal relationship? Who knows why the game really died out? OK, enough nitpicking for now. Flapdragon 02:02, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
hm, so is the idea here that the "snatching" is done with the mouth, meaning you have to plunge your head into the flames, or may you use your hands? 09:07, 14 October 2005 (UTC)~
The "children" bit has made its way to the Main Page today. I find the connection spurious. The article cites the Strutt reference for this, but the actual content of the reference [1] only uses the phrase "the young people of both sexes". To me this is much more likely to indicate late teens or early 20s; the age around which young adults are given the freedom to do stupid daring things to themselves. The fact that it particularly mentions "of both sexes" suggests that it was a young people's liquored-up party game. Something akin to, say, beer-shooting. It's also worth noting that the Strutt doc mentions "burning their hands", meaning that this is not a daredevil's bobbing-for-apples game; hands were used to pick out the raisins, which were plenty hot (and stickily juicy), enough to scald the mouth once broken open during eating. - Keith D. Tyler ¶ 18:12, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Well not entirely.... My family still play this from time to time, mostly around Christmas and New Year (and we call it snapdragon). Anyone managing to transport a still-burning raisin to their mouth gets an admiring reaction (it's not easy to do). I'm pleased to say that we have had no incidences of burn injuries! 88.110.106.224 11:08, 14 October 2005 (UTC)Claire PS We use fingers to pick the raisins out - use of the mouth would surely be injurious to hairstyles let alone anything else... Further, the whole family play and I can remember doing so (with some trepidation) as a fairly small child - I'd call it a "family game" 88.110.106.224 11:13, 14 October 2005 (UTC)Claire
I played this game as a child when visiting my grandparents who were born in the US but who both had English parents. We called the game "Raisin Snatch" and it was played at Christmas after dinner. Grandmother heated up a large heatproof platter and plumped the raisins in hot water. The drained raisins were spread on the hot platter and then brandy was poured over the raisins. The lights were turned out and my grandpa would carry the platter to the table with the raisins in flames. The goal was to snatch all of the raisins off the platter before the flames went out. The alcohol flame was not all that hot but it was still exciting and scary to stick your hands in the flames and try to get the raisins in your mouth before the flames went out. I've introduced my children to this game and hope they will carry the tradition on into the future. On several Christmases I have been on vacation and have introduced this game to my fellow travelers in Nepal and Peru. I always assumed the game had some relationship to the English flaming Plum Pudding. Making a plum pudding is alot of work so I imagined someone proclaiming, "Skip the pudding, let's just flame the raisins!" By the way, in my family, there was no drinking of the brandy, and the alcohol burned off leaving just the taste of the liquor. My grandmother, a staunch Methodist, would not have allowed us to play this game if she thought we were actually drinking alcohol. 24.5.152.132 ( talk) 06:18, 2 December 2008 (UTC)deanna statler
My family has played this continuously through the generations, and still continues to. We came out of Sheffield area in England, and have since spread to Canada and the US. I glad to hear others still know what it is to stir up the fire and eat hot raisins. We are told a wish would come true if we got the raisins into our mouths still flaming. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flatcan ( talk • contribs) 23:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I can concur with the above. My family has also played this game and still does. Since the 1950s I personally have played it on Christmas Eve in the Great Hall at Kincardine Castle in Scotland's Royal Deeside. In the early days the only light was from the log fire and the flaming brandy as the Christmas Tree was only lit by candles and thus the lit tree was a rather brief one-off event. We had to make sure the raisins were still flaming when they went into our mouths and as children were told we must eat at least twelve in this way to ensure we had 12 lucky months ahead of us. We kept eating until the flames died out and by then the brandy wasn't worth drinking as the alcohol had burned off. Even as children we worked that one out pretty quickly. We last played the game on 24th December 2011. 86.141.110.19 ( talk) 17:00, 28 December 2011 (UTC)
In another tradition, one of the raisins contains a gold button and becomes 'the lucky raisin'.
A raisin containing a button? Come on! Is that physically possible? Anyway, did people really have gold buttons? Perhaps the writer meant gold-coloured. Flapdragon 17:04, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
We always use quite large raisins - I think they're muscat? Not sure. I think this is because normal-size ones would be quite hard to pick up fast enough. Anyhow, I think they would be large enough to put a small button inside. 88.110.106.224 23:05, 14 October 2005 (UTC)Claire
I deleted the "English" bit in an earlier edit (I should really have said so) because there didn't seem to be any evidence that the game wasn't played outside England, which on the face of it looked unlikely; the timeframe then given ("Georgian and Victorian") was excessively restrictive and given that the same might be true of the geographical restriction, it seemed safer not to specify a country. I considered changing it to "British" but that would just have been guesswork. However, it does seem unlikely that the game was not played elsewhere. The only light I can shed is that the entry for snapdragon in Harrap's New Standard French and English Dictionary (first published 1939, this from the 1980 edition) is "jeu (de Noël) qui consiste à happer des raisins sec dans du cognac flambant et à les manger touts chauds" [(Christmas) game consisting of grabbing raisins out of burning brandy and eating them hot]. Though this doesn't prove the game was unknown in France, it shows at least that the editors were unable to find a French translation. In the absence of reliable info, I'd say it's probably better to leave the geography unspecified. Flapdragon 19:21, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
Maybe the simplest approach would be to leave an unspoken implication that it is British, and mention the interesting point made by Chambers (a Scottish publisher, so they should know!)? Otherwise we'd get horribly bogged down in questions of exactly which bits of the UK practised it. Actually I could believe that it was just England: Wales has different (cheaper!) Christmas customs, and perhaps Scotland would disapprove of such profligacy with expensive foreign liquor?! Flapdragon 20:38, 14 October 2005 (UTC) Still practiced, growing up third-generation Canadian, and now my kids, raised in the States, practice it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flatcan ( talk • contribs) 23:38, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
I thought snap-dragons were a flower. If not, what are those flowers called that people have been calling "Snap-dragons"?-- Redandready 16:07, 9 August 2007 (UTC)
I remember calling the antirrhinum flower a 'snap-dragon' or 'bunny-rabbit' as a kid (back in the 1950s). I think the 'bunny-rabbit' name I learned from my grand-mother N790 ( talk) 10:33, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
I think it would help if this section was rearranged, or if reference was made to the drinking version of the game earlier on. As it stands, the literary quotations don't make sense until one has read on to the description of the old version of the game. Melaena ( talk) 11:15, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
Just popped in to note that the "first printed mention" sections are derived from the OED - uncited, but not original research. which may have led to the practice mostly dying out in the early 20th century is speculation and should be removed. I'm no longer actively editing, but if someone else wants to pick up the ball here I'd welcome it.
Ziggurat 03:12, 19 October 2009 (UTC)
Although I'm not quite brave enough to use fingers, I can confirm that this is still a fun game to play using metal forks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.194.171.29 ( talk) 01:14, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
The last sentence in the first paragraph struck me as peculiar, and potentially out of place. Is the "Cameron Clan" somehow notable? (Do they have their own wiki article I may be missing?). Is there annual event well documented previously that a citation could be included? Thanks for the interesting content though! Cheers! -- Elfabet ( talk) 18:27, 22 August 2018 (UTC)
.. or rather a tradition of eating? There seems to be no rules, no winner, no play, only an effort to eat. If it is otherwise, please clarify it somewhere in the article. (for a definition of what consists a game on can also refer to Game )