They are on Kindle. Little House on the Prairie.
StG
I never saw more than a few minutes of the show, but I know what you mean. It has been many years since I read the complete set and I may be misremembering. Big Woods in particular seemed… namby in spots, but then, many book series Written For Children have weak beginnings. (Narnia comes to mind - the first book is almost nauseating in spots, and the later ones almost shocking in their adult themes and tone.)
I guess I was just old and aware enough to realize how much was being downplayed in all the disasters and crises. That must linger in my assessment.
19th Century White People Problems. 
Better than the dry look he had on TV. 
My great aunts were born in 1889 and while they grew up in rural Alabama it wasn’t the frontier, but their Christmas whey they were kids was oranges (1 or 2 each) and if the crops allowed a school dress. The house museums that are left from the 19th century give the idea of elegance and lace and lots of material posessions, but these were the homes of the top 10% if that. For the vast majority of people life was closer to subsistence and anything you didn’t HAVE to have was exotic.
For House Ingalls, everything they owned had been pulled across Indian territory in a wagon that had about as much space as a King sized bed, and that had to include bedding, clothes, cooking pots, plow, and tools needed to,survive. IIRC Ma brought a small porcelain lady and that was about it for the family’s non-essentials. Mary and Laura would have had memories of more stuff in Wisconsin but it wouldn’t have been much more and it would have been fading.
An idea of how few material possessions people had on the frontier can be gleaned from the fact that they often burned down their houses and outbuildings when they moved (if they didn’t have a buyer, of course) because it made it easier to recoup the nails, hinges, and other metal to take with them to the new place.
I remember another notable thing from that Christmas – they each got a white cake. A cake. Made with white flour. And white sugar. They just stared at them for a while. Good girl Mary kept staring, bad girl Laura took the tiniest bit, on the bottom, where it wouldn’t show.
See, the point is sweets are supposed to be a rare treat, not some civil right all people have on demand. Damn. I may stop drinking soda for a week just on general principal.
I wonder how long it took them to eat those cakes.
And yet my business making tin socks never went anywhere.
You should have branched out into foil hats.
Take too long to eat it and it would get moldy. Wouldn’t that suck?
My mother grew up on a northern farm during the Depression and had many stories not too far removed from LHOTP.
One was that if all the kids (seven, eventually) got a treat, like a Christmas chocolate bar, the game was to eat yours as slowly as possible, so that days after the others had finished theirs, you could sit in front of them and nibble and make them “licious.”
Or split the difference and make tin top hats. (No idea why I want one of these.)
Because you’ve always wanted to be a Monopoly piece?
Welcome to Minnesota.
Currently reading the series to my family of wife, 11, and 6. There’s some pretty dire straits. And as someone mentioned, I paraphrase or simply skip over the anti-Indian parts.
We’re in the middle of The Long Winter…right before it gets take serious.
Eta:
It’s come up in a LHOTP thread before what a hard time Pa had. He did seem to fail at day near everything he tried, and only got ahead when he got a job from family. Not mentioned in the books is how he apparently skipped out on some debt in Iowa.
Every time he buys something on credit ormg mentions how next year’s crop of wheat will fix all their problems, wife and I just groan and roll our eyes.
Monty Python? Luxury!
Serious comment – 2nding Catamount’s recommendation; it’s an amazing book.
Please tell me that was made from a stovepipe…
Extra points if you suffer eyestrain from reading by a dim, flickering, smelly kerosene lamp.
Unfortunately, there’s no kerosene left in town…trains snowed in, you know.
They’re cheaper and last longer than the silk/beaver/whatever models? :dubious: 
What?!? You would bowdlerize US history to keep from offending your family’s sensibilities??? :eek:
Tsk, tsk! 
