>Nasty Nursery Rhymes
>When Baby was very small, I sang her a lullaby in front of one of my stepdaughters.
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
and down will come baby, cradle and all....
“Oh,” I said. “Well, they had their version and I have mine.”
“You should sing it that way, too,” my stepdaughter continued. “Your way is scary and mean.”
“Well, your way is wimpy and doesn’t rhyme,” I said with the best fake smile I could muster. “Little darling.”
If you’re not careful when running down a hill, you can be seriously injured.
When you see a spider with strange markings on its back, it’s best to just run away.
The next time you get the urge to jump over a candlestick, for God’s sake, be nimble and quick about it.
If some guy ever talks about putting you in a pumpkin shell, get the hell away. Particularly if he’s wearing tights.
Wash your hands after playing Ring Around the Rosie or you might end up catching some really nasty germs.
I don’t really understand why many of today’s nursery rhyme books either sanitize the nastier rhymes or eliminate them altogether. For instance, it’s almost impossible these days to find a children’s book that includes the classic, Ladybug, Ladybug, Fly Away Home…
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
All except one, her name is Ann
And she crept under the frying pan.
“Oh poor ladybug,” Baby said one time, looking at the pictures in the one copy I was able to find for her to read. “Why she so sad?”
“Well, Baby,” I said gently. “I guess if your house burned down and almost all of your kids ran away, you’d be sad, too.” She seemed pretty satisfied by my answer and I congratulated myself on teaching my kid some street smarts at the tender age of two.
And so while today’s happy-rhyme kids are sniveling over the cable going out just as Diego is starting, mine is stoic, understanding full well that cable might falter and playground visits are sometimes rained out, egg men break and can’t be repaired, cookies burn, bridges fall down, favorite dolls get left in taxicabs and noses get snapped off by blackbirds.
>crack me up…too funny. And hell, Yeah, I use the REAL nursery rhymes…only sometimes I substitute Bug’s name instead of BABY, and then I drop him…ALMOST. He LOVES it.Life’s tough, better teach your kids now!!!
>Ha! I love that last one. Blackbird pie indeed. Very clever!There’s an Andrew Bird song about old fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm being “declawed” over time. When I read the originals, I was shocked; those old stories were pretty horrific!
>Check out Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: how those fairy tales (also often modified to be less “frightening”) have functioned in society and information they transfer to kids. Brief overview…http://www.geocities.com/jvertesi/starwars/bettelheim.htm
>”Life’s a Bitch and Then You Eat Blackbird Pie.”haaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Excellent.
>Hilarious! When I had children, my mother gave me The Book of Virtues, a collection of moral stories. There are literally hundreds of rhymes and stories such as “Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a Lion” and “Rebecca, who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably”. Some of them are quite horrific but funny in the way they try to teach that bad things always happen to bad little children.
>I’ll buy the book. I always read Mother Goose originals to my sons and have always told them life’s not fair, never will be, get used to it. They seem pretty dang happy to me!:)
>When my son was little, I used to read Alan Ginsberg poetry to him. It’s never too early to expose them to the classics.
>I’d forgotten how violent Mother Goose was until I received an “original” edition at my shower.Spousal abuse, child abuse, murder, death, disease, vengeance, retribution…could almost be the Bible!I like Peter Paul & Mommy’s version of Ladybug Ladybug. That gentle male voice crooning softly,”your house is on fire, and your children,they will burn.”Good times.
>HahAhahaA!You’re awesome.
>Ha! I have the Book of Virtues too, I love it! My mother read it to me when I was young, then bought me my own copy and I read it to my son.Does anyone remember Little Orphan Annie? “the goblins will get ya if you don’t watch out” (of course, only if you’re a mean litle brat)
>Sorry….had one more thought. A couple years ago I read a re-written version of the Spider and the Fly. The fly doesn’t get eaten.What’s that all about?
>When the bough breaks, the cradle will falland Mommy will catch you, cradle and all…That’s how I sing it.I do have some of my Dad’s childhood books – scary stuff indeed.
>Did you ever hear the alternative version of the teddy bears picnic? It was MUCH more interesting than the original!
>I have noticed that the versions of songs that I knew as a kid have been changed as well. 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed — “That’s what you get for jumping on the bed (dumbass)” is “No more monkeys jumping on the bed (pretty please)”What’s going on here? Conspiracy of niceness… doesn’t work for me!
>Hansel and Gretel is the perfect example!What better way to teach our children stranger danger than to tell them a story about two kids who take candy from a stranger, follow her home, and get shoved in an oven.I mean, it’s hard but hey, it’s honest.
>I do change the words to ladybug and rockabye baby. my daughter would run crying to me before when she heard those two songs on the CD.But some tales I leave alone, like Hansel and Gretel.
>ROFL!My girlfriend bought me a “real” Mother Goose book when I was pregnant with our first – I almost died at the rhymes that were in there. I wonder if I still have it? I’m pretty sure I’m ok, even though I now know what “curds” are. *hurl*
>My mom still has the big original Mother Goose book we had when we were kids. Boy, old Mother Hubbard was a real piece of work. She beat the snot out of her kids and then starved them… And there is a greeeeat picture of her chasing them around with a bullwhip!
>I have a very old (1930’s) version of Grimm fairy tales, and grim is an accurate description. I have not looked at it in ages, but the outcomes can be pretty darn rough. In one tale (I can’t remember which), they ask the person what the worst thing they can think of would be, and they say having their head cut off and put on a stick at the edge of town, and “so it was done.” Wow! Nothing like the Disney versions my two girls love. Probably just doesn’t translate to the screen that well . . .
>Very funny.My sister sent me – just because it was horrible – a book of Christian nursery rhymes whichtook the classic Mother Goose and sanitized it to be sweet and happy and all about Jesus. If you would like to witness the horror, you can find it here.
>My Fairy Tale book as a child was The Tasha Tudor Book of Fairy Tales – and let me tell you – some of those tales were definitely not child-proofed! From “The Valiant Tailor” to “The Tinder Box” – these tales taught that morality is very often at the mercy of unscrupulous persons – which is true. Take “Jack and the Beanstalk” for instance. Jack is very definitely not painted as a hero. I came away feeling very sorry for the poor giant. He had been tricked and lied to. The story is presented without preamble and in very basic terms – as are all of the stories. To change them in order to fit contemporary concepts of morality would be wrong in my opinion. So give me my four and twenty blackbirds straight up, no chaser if you please!
>ROTF!! I like to say that Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
>I love this. And I can even claim it’s appropriate reading for work, being about kids lit and all…
>We are studying fairy tales in college. One thing to keep in mind, when the Grimm brothers wrote the written version of oral tales of generations, they even changed and made the tales even more mild than the orginal oral tales. In Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, the stepmother was really a mother, the way Grimm’s first heard it. They changed it to a stepmother. They also changed a lot of the stories to reflect their relgious beliefs.
>The watering down of Nursery rhymes or anything that has a message due to illicit rampant political correctness is a thorn in our societies side if not mind.I agree the originals that we grew up on, though dark and Grim, (No Pun intended), are intended to make the readers aware of the dangers that exists in life and society. And that naivety is in most cases killer and does not breed bliss as modern day adversaries to items such as Nursery rhymes would have us believe.Thank you for braving the waters of adversity.