Yes, I know all about the Native American hate and White entitlement attitudes. It’s the most objectionable book in the series, blah, blah, blah…
But ever since reading this book when I was young, there was always one big annoyance for me.
There’s a chapter where Mr. Edwards goes forty miles and fords a freezing river to bring Christmas presents for Mary and Laura.
He tells them a cute story about meeting Santa Claus and his pack mule, then Ma puts the presents in the stockings while the girls hide their eyes. And those eagerly awaited presents turn out to be…
…tin cups.
Laura is laughing and jumping up and down. Mary is just quietly looking at her cup. I’d be quietly looking too…
…because I’d be pissed.
Honest to god, the guy travels forty miles through ice and snow and he brings tin cups as Christmas presents for little girls?
He couldn’t pick up some jacks or a yoyo or something? It’s Christmas fer cryin’ out loud. I was a little Jehovah’s Witness when I first read that and I felt disappointed for them, despite Laura wild glee at getting anything at all. This, of course, was the heavy handed moral of the story.
My guess is that the family probably just had one or two cups so the tin cups were important objects because they belonged individually to them. It’s been a long time but my impression was that they were especially poor (thanks to Pa’s inability to stay in one place). In such an isolated territory- the availability of children’s playthings would have been sparse even at the local trading post so maybe he just picked the shiniest objects he could find.
OP, you have absolutely no idea how poor most people were back then. That might have been all that Mr. Edwards felt he could afford. Or maybe there wasn’t anything else available.
My grandma grew up during the Depression. She placed a very heavy emphasis on giving practical gifts–something that the recipient could use.
And they were totally incapable of making any more cups themselves? Out of metal or wood or anything? This sounds touching at the very surface, but just doesn’t hold up if you think about it.
And it was rusty. And it was used to collect semen from the bull. And it leaked, so the dried clot of semen plugging the hole couldn’t be removed. And the rim was razor sharp.
Wilder started writing the books sixty years after the events had taken place. Her parents and her sisters were dead. She was writing from the memory of a little girl. There has always been controversy over how accurate the books even are.
Stop applying the standards of the present to the fictionalized accounts of the past.
The Todd Denault biography of hockey great Jacques Plante says that he was one of 11 children growing up in Quebec during the Depression. Christmas at Chez Plante consisted of his father buying two bottles or soda pop and each child getting to sip their share.
Plante always said that soda tasted better than any champagne he ever drank when his team won the Stanley Cup.
Actually, I do have an idea of what it’s like to be poor. Maybe not that poor, but when I was little, we made spaghetti out of noodles and ketchup, and once Mom had to sell her wedding ring for food money. My folks still managed to get me toys though.
I still roll my eyes at the cup thing. Tie a string and a button to it and make it ball in a cup. Just something playful. Gaah!
Also in their stockings, Mary and Laura each got a little cake (made with WHITE FLOUR!) and, drumroll please…a shiny new penny.
When they hadn’t been expecting anything, because Santa couldn’t get to them due to the weather. Better than the presents was the story Mr. Edwards told them about meeting Santa.
Furthermore, in Little House in the Big Woods, (the first book in the series), the kids (including cousins) only got a stick of peppermint candy and mittens. (Laura got a rag doll, but it’s made pretty clear each girl gets a rag doll when she turns a certain age.) They weren’t expecting many gifts.
Something I didn’t realize until I read the Pioneer Girl autobiography is that the first two books are out of sequence: the Ingalls actually lived in Kansas first and then moved to Wisconsin. So Laura was actually three or four during the Tin Cup Christmas, which makes more sense. That age group is very in to getting their very own of something because they are Big Boys and Girls not babies.
My understanding is that some of it was done deliberately, with the idea that book-buyers would care more about good story than accuracy. There are changes to the sequences of some events, and the ages of the children, in what were intended as narrative-flow improvements. Also, some genuinely harsh events, like neighbors starving to death in winter, were toned down for popular consumption.
Exactly. Drinking vessels tended to be communal rather than personal; a drinking spring or water bucket had one cup or dipper that everybody shared.
Also, a cup wasn’t just for liquids; you could use it for soup or porridge or what-have-you. It was your own personal vessel, something that used to be considered so important that the canonical christening gift was a silver mug or tankard.
Even today, don’t you find that children like having a bowl or mug that’s officially “theirs”? Manufacturers do a lively trade in selling ones personalized with kids’ names, after all.
Full disclosure: When I was a little kid some 45 years ago, my brother and I were given little mugs, not tin but stainless steel. They were of slightly different shapes so it was obvious which was which, and it was clear from that day forth that that little steel mug was MINE. I LOVED that little thing. (I still have it.) So I never thought that the “tin cup as a Christmas gift” episode seemed disappointing or puzzling in any way.
Maybe you young’uns with your experience of constant tableware abundance and individual drinking vessels everywhere, as part of the modern craze for having your water bottle with you wherever you go, just can’t comprehend how special the idea of a drinking vessel that was reserved solely for your own individual use felt back in the day.
