Book club party games

Tomorrow night I am hosting my book club’s party; we will be discussing Sebastian Barry’s book, ‘A Long, Long Way’ but we will also be enjoying a Christmas celebration together too. We will each contribute something to a shared meal (midnight soup from me) and I will be doing a quiz.

I thought that this year for something different we would play pass-the-parcel you know how to play that, don’t you? The prize is wrapped in a series of papers, between each one is a little gift which can only be won by doing a forfeit. Music is played and the parcel is passed and when the music stops (switched off by an unseeing hand) whoever holds the parcel unwraps a layer of paper. For my game, instead of a forfeit for the little gifts between the wrappings there will be a Christmas or winter poem to be read out loud. There are five of us,so five poems. Here is the first, my favourite of Shakespeare’s sonnets, number 73:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.