Gilded Age Picnicking Etiquette

Avoid conflicting contusions upon your next neighbor by grabbing wildly at the olive dish. If you do thus grab for it, he is likely to do the same thing at the same moment. Cruel bodily injuries have resulted from this course of action. The danger arises from the fact that olives are the staff of life at picnics.

Follow the Rules Of Conduct

There are certain principles of conduct with regard to picnics which it is well to observe. For one thing, never go early to a picnic. If you do go early you will have to carry tubs containing ice cream freezers, packed in ice, pails of water, rugs and garden seats and perform a great many other laborious tasks. A picnic is a good deal like coasting, except that it is the other way around—the hard work comes before the fun instead of after it. When a picnic is over and most of the things are eaten up it is not much work to sweep dishes together and carry them away. But the getting of them there is terrible. So it is a point of reasonable conduct to come a little late. 

Another point is to decline nothing that is offered in the way of food. Don’t refuse rolls on the expectation of getting sandwiches, because you may not get the sandwiches. Keep the rolls; you needn't eat them if you get the sandwiches. Another point—avoid conflicting contusions upon your next neighbor by grabbing wildly at the olive dish. If you do thus grab for it, he is likely to do the same thing at the same moment. Cruel bodily injuries have resulted from this course of action. The danger arises from the fact that olives are the staff of life at picnics. 

Gentlemen in waiting upon ladies, should occasionally furtively bolt a sandwich as a matter of prevision, since the eatables may all be consumed or the inevitable rainstorm come up before the ladies are fully waited upon. Any one can get through a picnic day safely and comfortably without ice cream, macaroons, frosted cake or other delicacies, but sustenance of some sort he must have. For this reason, as one passes behind a tree in the course of his admirable struggle to see that the ladies have everything, he should rapidly swallow a sandwich. With attention to a few prudent details such as these, picnics may be deprived of fully one-half of their terrors. —Boston Transcript, 1892

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