Sleepy Hollow Place Cards

Twelve tent place cards on two letter sheets. The front of each has a gold platter, a line for the guest’s name and the card’s title. The back quotes Washington Irving’s own description of that dish or character from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). They go with the Sleepy Hollow Harvest party blueprint and the Sleepy Hollow invitation.

The Twelve Cards

Page 1, the tea-table: the doughty dough-nut, the tender oly-koek, the crumbling cruller, the pumpkin pie, the honey cake and the motherly tea-pot. Irving lists them as one heap: “There was the doughty dough-nut, the tender oly-koek, and the crisp and crumbling cruller; sweet cakes and short cakes, ginger cakes and honey cakes, and the whole family of cakes.” The dough-nut and the oly-koek are separate items on his table, so they get separate cards.

Page 2, the company:

• Ichabod Crane: a weather-cock, for the head that “looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck”
• Katrina Van Tassel: a peach, “rosy-cheeked as one of her father’s peaches”
• Brom Bones: “a fur cap, surmounted with a flaunting fox’s tail”
• Baltus Van Tassel: a face “round and jolly as the harvest moon”
• Gunpowder: a horseshoe for Ichabod’s borrowed plow-horse, “gaunt and shagged, with a ewe neck and a head like a hammer”
• The Headless Horseman: the pumpkin found by the brook after Ichabod vanished, “close beside” his hat

The quotations are checked against the 1897 R. H. Russell edition at the Library of Congress and the Project Gutenberg text.

Cutting and Folding

Print both pages at actual size. There is no drawn outline: cut between the crop marks at each corner. Each card is 3.75 x 3.25 inches and folds on the stitched midline into a 3.75 x 1.6 inch tent, lined up with the small ticks outside each card’s edges. The quote side is printed upside down on purpose, so it reads the right way up once folded. Write names in gold or white pen on the dark version, or in black on the light one.

Seat the Horseman card at the head of the table, or deal the character cards face down and let guests find out who they are. The Halloween table setting ideas cover the rest of the table.