Our town has a Halloween Ghost Story contest every year. I enter almost every year (I took first the first year they had it). MilliCal has entered, as well, and took first place the first year she tried it (although we’re not the first father/daughter winning team. Darn.)
I’m entering her handwritten story in the computer tonight.
“It has werewolves, zombies, the Blob, and a Galactic Overlord,” she told me.
“I see,” I replied.
“The Galactic Overlord is named Leslie.”
Do other families have conversations like this?
Having typed the thing in, I have to say I’m impressed by this. If you look at the thing straight on, you’d say it was an example of bad kid’s writing with repetition and non-sequiturs, but if you thought an adult wrote it, you’d say it was a parody of adventure stories. It’s not just the fact that I’m her dad that makes me incline towards the latter – it’s because I know that she’s been reading such parodistic stories lately.
I’m amazed at the phrases and concepts she’s imbibed without me knowing about it. I had no idea she’d even heard of a Galactic Overlord, or had seen the original Blob, or knew about remakes and sequels to it, or knew the ending well enough to use it in a story (and even to use it with multiple meanings in her story).
Apparently she was originally going to have a group of Amish kids trick-or-treating as her heroes, but she talked to Pepper Mill and found out that Amish don’t observe Halloween, so she changed them to Pagans. If this story wins a prize and gets published online, a lot of people are going to think we’re Pagan, since it’s written in First Person.
My wife and I upon practicing for the Future-Phlosphr-Family-to-be routinely take our niece and nephew for weekends at our house. They love Uncle Phlosphr and I try my best to teach them the ways of the world. They are 6 and 4 respectively. No video games, no T.V we read and play in the woods a lot. I just read them Tolkien’s Smith of Wooten Major and they loved it.
Our little neice decided she wanted to draw a fairy tale of her own. So we got out the markers and she started drawing. I was absolutely flabbergasted watching her draw, and talk while she was drawing.
"…and this little troll was different from the rest, she didn’t like eating people, she only ate pink marshmallows! Her little brother troll would always take the marhsmallows from her and hide them in the forest where she would have to find them and eat them…
So in answer to your question, yes families do talk about things like what you describe, and the little ones do go into really cool little soliloquies about the stories they are telling in their little heads.
I love it!
p.s. I really wish we had made it to Salem… maybe next year…
By the way – you don’t have to wait until Halloween. Should you find yourself in the neighborhood, we can get together. Or we can come down there where you are. (By the way – where exactly ARE you?)
We use a hand-powered one, like the ones they’re developing for the third world. And it doesn’t have any of those flashy chrome bumpers. If it comes with those, we paint them black. But we still have to put a reflective triangle on the back.*
We’re not Amish, but Pepper Mill, who has a surpeising blend of nationalities in her ancestry, is part Pennsylvania Dutch. And makes a mean Shoo-Fly Pie.
*(People who live in or have passed through Lancaster County will understand all this).
