Like a fish to the bait I rise and will no doubt wish I hadn’t. But really. Can we talk?
It seems that the gossip-mongers are at it again, raising disbelief among our youth in the guise of correcting lies their parents have told them.
And at the same time, they are stealing bits and pieces of the children’s childhood.
I’ve just come up for air, having buried my nose in a musty old book I found on a shelf. Prone as I am to fits of sneezing when mold and dust fly about, there are probably wiser ways to spend my time. But this was a book I came upon while looking for something else. After you page past the green and white checkerboard, you come to the first poem, Little Bo-Peep. On the same page is Little Boy Blue, then See-saw, Margery Daw, Thirty Days Hath September and If Wishes were Horses….What a treasure!
Copyrighted in 1916 by Rand McNally, mine is a 1939 edition, and very tattered and torn. I thought it was long gone; finding it is like finding an old friend. It has 135 pages, and most of them have two or three rhymes or riddles on them.
The pages are liberally illustrated with small drawings and numerous full-size plates in that delightful turn-of-the-century dress style so familiar to readers of a “certain age.” If I’d not let myself get so close to deadline, I’d see if there isn’t a Web site that would identify the artist and her style. (The illustrator has to have been a woman: Her children are so honestly drawn and colored.)
Did I mention that my precious find is British through and through, although there again, if there was ever a page that gave credit to the book’s creator, it is long gone. The book, of course, is The Real Mother Goose, and there she is on the cover, flying through the air on the back of a gander, with a laughing baby in a basket on her arm and a red cape billowing behind her.
I’ve seen modern replicas of this wonderful collection – no, not likely all of it, come to think of it. A sheer guess would say there are over 500 poems in this tome, and so many have purely English expressions that Americans would have a hard time explaining what they mean to their children. If they knew themselves.
Know the second verse of “Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home! / Your house is on fire, your children all gone”? What was the remedy for Jack’s “crown,” broken in that nasty tumble he took down the hill?
Did you set your children giggling by reciting the high drama of the entire “House that Jack Built” and “This Little Pig went to Market”?
Oh, dear, what can the matter be? Some are a bit rough. Old Mother Hubbard’s dog’s adventures go quite beyond merely starving. And in “The Death and Burial of Poor Cock Robin,” the fish admits to catching Cock Robin’s blood in a little dish.
I think I never loved these rhymes as much as the day we were in one of England’s fine, fast trains and the sign over a station we passed through said we were in Banbury Cross. We saw no “old lady on a white horse,” but that was enough. It told me Mother Goose was real.
And we spent a day in St. Ives, not far from Penzance. I’ll bet Gilbert and Sullivan knew Mother Goose rhymes by the way they penned that town’s history of piracy. All I could think of that day was this riddle: “As I was going to St. Ives / I met a man with seven wives. / Every wife had seven sacks, / Every sack had seven cats, / Every cat had seven kits. / Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, / How many were going to St. Ives?”
The book for which I was emptying the shelves was a fine paperback edition of The Night Before Christmas. We’ll take it along for Dave to read to the grandchildren on Christmas Eve, and I promise you that the eldest, nearly 20, will laugh just as loud as the youngest when he puts on his silly accent and says the words wrong.
Rumor has it hereabouts that we are doing our children a disservice to let them think Santa Claus is real. We’d rather, I suspect, let them think blowing the heads off “perps” in electronic and anatomical excess is healthier, because it really happens on our streets.
There’s an easy way to explain St. Nick, if he needs explaining. You say to your wavering child – who has heard “the truth” from an older sibling or school chum – “Do you believe we love you?” Unless you’re a really cold parent, I think your child will say, “Yes.”
“How do you know?” you ask. “I just know,” he’ll say.
“But, how do you know? Have you ever seen love?” “Noo-oo-o.”
“Do you have to see something to know if it’s real? Like the wind, for instance. You’ve never seen the wind, but you know there is such a thing, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but – ”
“You don’t have to see something to know it’s real. We believe in Santa Claus because we believe a saint named Nicholas brought love and food to those in need, long, long ago, and we have fun pretending that your Sunday School teacher or the chief of the fire department is Santa Claus when he dresses all in red and white and takes food and toys to children who need them.
“You can’t see love, and you can’t see the real Saint Nicholas because he died many years ago, but you can believe he is still real, just as love is real. And now that you’re in on the secret, it’s your grown-up responsibility to help your little sister believe in Santa Claus as long as she wants to. By helping her put out cookies and milk, Santa's legend will live on and give her fun while doing good things for other children.
“And that’s how we know there is a real Santa Claus, because we give gifts and love to each other.”
Sallie Satterthwaite is the Lifestyle Columnist for The Citizen newspapers.
