The traditional matchmaking games Irish girls would play at Halloween

Directions

1. A group of girls would place bits of lead inside a tin box and set it on small coals over the hearth to melt. Using an old key with a large ring-shaped holder, they would fling the box through the ring into a basin of cold water to resolidify the lead. Strange shapes would form from the cooled lead, and one girl would tell another, "That is the boy you will marry."
2. Three saucers were set on a table: one with water, one with a ring, and one with clay. A participant was blindfolded and guided back to the table to choose a saucer. Touching the water saucer meant she would sail to a new country before next Halloween; the ring saucer meant marriage before next Halloween; the clay saucer meant death and burial within a year.
3. A ring was baked into a cake each Halloween. The person who found the ring in their slice would be married within the following year.
4. A girl would stand at an open window holding a spool of thread. She would toss the spool outside while keeping one end of the thread in her hand. As she wound the thread back inside, if any boy walked past before she finished, that boy would become her future husband.
5. Another method using thread for marriage divination involved going to a lime kiln after midnight on Halloween and dropping a string of thread into it. When you pulled the thread back out, you would supposedly see the face of your future spouse.
6. Twenty-six tiny paper slips, each inscribed with a letter of the alphabet, were placed into a bucket of water and left out overnight on Halloween. The next morning, the letters floating on the surface would spell the name of your future spouse (so no repeated letters in a name, it seems).
7. Placing a leaf under your pillow on Halloween night would supposedly cause you to dream of the person you are destined to marry.
8. A girl would peel an entire apple in one long strip and then toss the peel over her shoulder. The shape the peel formed on the floor was believed to spell out the initials of her future husband.
9. A girl would peel a potato and hang the skin beside the fire on Halloween. The first man to enter the house afterward would become her husband—hopefully not a family member!
10. According to one tale, before the evening ended, the group of girls would head to a cabbage patch and each pick a head of cabbage. A cabbage with a crooked stump meant she would marry a hunchbacked man; a straight stump meant a tall, upright man.