♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #63
Folktales – What does it mean to you or how do you celebrate?
Welcome back to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop! If you’re new to the series, the authors included are grateful for your reads and appreciate, even more so, when you share our writings with your friends. If you’re new to the series, welcome aboard. The authors engage and impress weekly. Be prepared to become a regular reader.
Fall is my absolute favorite time of year. Hands down, this is when I am at my best all around. Something about the change in weather, the changes in the trees–it all creates a wistful mood of contentment and a stirring excitement. Perhaps it is because Halloween is the start of several feast centered celebrations (and all those goodies).
Part of those celebrations and season changes are the stories we tell. Folk tales are a wonderful tradition that include the campfire tales we whisper to scare one another in the dark of night. Some of us are lucky enough to live in the towns and cities from which these tales originated. Growing up, I knew that James Fenimore Cooper wrote some of his Leatherstocking Tales in what is now called the Brookside Museum that is just a couple miles from my childhood home. But that was not all…
Upstate New York likes to brag about William Kennedy, but he and Cooper aren’t the only ones who have written here. Washington Irving penned a clever tale in 1820 that still puts the chill in people’s bones today. The setting was a quiet hamlet south of Albany and just north of New York City, called Sleepy Hollow. My first exposure to this tale was in the form of the whimsical Disney animation paired with a rollicking ride by Kenneth Grahame called Mr. Toad (Wind In The Willows). When you’re a little kid, Ichabod’s adventure can still be quite dark. As I grew, it simply became a seasonal delight. I look forward to watching it every year.
This tale, along with Arsenic and Old Lace and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, will be on the list.
The first time I made the connection between the story of Ichabod and the city of Sleepy Hollow, I was on a trip to New York City with my class to see the Rockettes perform their Nutcracker show. I was in Junior High School. My mind had buzzed with possibilities.
The old country wives, however, who are the best judges of these matters, maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means. The bridge became more than ever an object of superstitious awe, and that may be the reason why the road has been altered of late years, so as to approach the church by the border of the millpond. The schoolhouse, being deserted, soon fell to decay, and was reported to be haunted by the the ghost of the unfortunate teacher; and the plowboy, loitering homeward of a still summer evening, has often fancied Ichabod’s voice at a distance, chanting a melancholy psalm tune among the tranquil solitudes of Sleepy Hollow. – Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
For a child that was already strong in imagination, this was only more food for such thoughts. Is there any doubt as to why I became an author?
Let’s hop on over to see what Folk Tales the other authors are sharing…
An InLinkz Link-up
I remember reading The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in school. (long before Disney got his hands on it.) Great story!
The Legend was on my list too. I’m glad I chose differently. Great story. The old writers produced some lovely things in the quiet of their era.
They really did. I am so grateful to them.
I remember as a child I would go out of my way to read as many ghost stories as I could in order to scare myself silly!
I did the same thing! I would think horrible things until I was so scared I couldn’t sleep. I’d do it to myself in the daytime when I was home alone. I thought I was a lone wolf like that…sorta nutty too. hahaha!