{"id":250,"date":"2010-12-03T22:59:34","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T22:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/?p=250"},"modified":"2010-12-03T22:59:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-03T22:59:34","slug":"the-brothers-grimm-really-were","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/?p=250","title":{"rendered":"The Brothers Grimm Really Were"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Do you remember Hansel and Gretel?\u00a0 I’m referring to the original story that became an opera by Englebert Humperdink long before\u00a0 Stephen Sondheim incorporated part of it into the Broadway show Into the Woods<\/em>? My recollections of\u00a0 H &G\u00a0 are filled with\u00a0 terror.\u00a0 Start with the mean parents abandoning their children in the dark woods, (some versions say the wife was really the stepmother, meant as a neat dig at stepparents), so that they would have fewer family members to feed. Clever Hansel leaves a trail of breadcrumbs to find the way back but the birds eat them so the children get lost. They wind up at the candy cottage inhabited by a witch who makes Cruella de Ville look like Miss Congeniality.\u00a0 Lost kids, scary woods, and a witch who thought a child was a top snack\u00a0 and ensnared them to fatten for the grill!!\u00a0 Even though the children finally escape the witch and force her into her own oven, it’s a frightening story.<\/p>\n

One modern H&G\u00a0 legacy is the build-your-0wn- gingerbread house, conveniently packaged and available at the supermarket. Martha types probably bake their own gingerbread and make their own icing ‘glue’–maybe they even make their own peppermint sticks and gumdrops. For the rest of us, the buy-and-construct version works just fine\u00a0\u00a0 Our gingerbread house-from-a -kit\u00a0 was constructed by two girls. One, nearly eleven, knows the\u00a0 Hansel story but, since she didn’t add that she hated it, has very likely only been exposed to the sanitized, Disneyesque version.
\nRecalling my fear when Hansel was read to me reminded me of of another unpleasant literary memory:\u00a0 Struwwelpeterter,\u00a0 (translated as ‘ Slovenly Peter’).<\/p>\n

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The book is a series of cautionary tales including\u00a0 the title story about a boy who wouldn’t cut his fingernails or hair and another describing a boy who tortured flies.\u00a0 The stories were so unpleasant I’m sure the intended messages never got through!<\/p>\n

Do you remember a childhood story that scared you? Let’s hear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you remember Hansel and Gretel?\u00a0 I’m referring to the original story that became an opera by Englebert Humperdink long before\u00a0 Stephen Sondheim incorporated part of it into the Broadway show Into the Woods? My recollections of\u00a0 H &G\u00a0 are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[32,31],"class_list":["post-250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-candy","tag-fairy-tales"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=250"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279,"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250\/revisions\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marigoldonline.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}