Snap-dragon (game)
Typically, lights were extinguished or dimmed to increase the eerie effect of the blue flames playing across the liquor.
The game is described in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as "a play in which they catch raisins out of burning brandy and, extinguishing them by closing the mouth, eat them".
[2] Snap-dragon was played in England, Canada, and the United States, but there is insufficient evidence of the practice in Scotland or other countries.
[7] The low bowl was typically placed in the middle of a table to prevent damage from inevitable splashes of burning brandy.
Most sources describe snap-dragon as a Christmas tradition, but Blain suggests that in the United States it was played at Halloween.
Mary F. Blain describes the belief that the person who snatches the most treats out of the brandy will meet their true love within a year.
In the short story Master Sandy's Snapdragon by Elbridge S. Brooks, snap-dragon is played in the royal household of James I of England.
[9] According to Robert Chambers' Book of Days (1879), the game was accompanied by a chant:[10] Here he comes with flaming bowl, Don't he mean to take his toll, Snip!
The first printed references to snap-dragons or flap-dragons are in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (1594): O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.
[14] Sandys cites a related variant of Snap-dragon where a lit candle end is placed in a cup of ale or cider; the aim is to quaff the liquor without singeing one's face.
In The Dark Flight Down by Marcus Sedgwick, chapter five describes a game of snapdragon played during the wake of Director Korp.
In the English play Lingua (1607), the practice is said to come from classical antiquity: "When Hercules had killed the flaming dragon of Hesperia with the apples of that orchard, he made this fiery meat; in memory whereof he named it Snapdragon.
"[21] Brooks' Master Sandy's Snapdragon suggests another mythical origin, relating the fire of snap-dragons to Saint George and the dragon.
[4] Michael Faraday, in his essay The Chemical History of a Candle (1860), suggests that the raisins in snap-dragon act like miniature wicks.
