Dear Children (mostly neeflings-not-visiting-me-at-the-moment),

As I am sure you are aware, your cousins, the Penguin Children, are visiting. Both of them have asked me what I want for my birthday, and I told BOTH of them that I LOVE stories and pictures drawn and written by children.

So, I am sort of asking for birthday presents here, but in return I am going to follow the Hobbit custom and post a story for you on the blog today. It's a bit long, so I will post part I today and part II -- um-- very soon. It really is mostly written. Unfortunately for your curiosity, there are three parts (so far), and I haven't even started part III yet. Also unfortunately for your curiosity, my motivation has never grown larger from nagging, so continually asking when I will finish is probably not the best strategy for getting me to do so. Telling me that you enjoyed the story might work, though. And if you are bored, you can write your own stories, right? Right.


Annabel and the Gorgon, part I: Magical Corrective Lenses


The week after Alexander met the gorgon on the way to his grandmother’s house, their Grandmother Hildegaard came to visit them. Alexander and his siblings, as usual, were delighted to have their grandmother for a visit, and they were very persistent about asking questions about her friend, the gorgon. Grandmother Hildegaard was not particularly forthcoming, however. She kept on putting them off and putting them off until finally, at dinnertime, she said,


“Children, I have decided that I cannot really tell you about the Gorgon myself. Her life story is very sad, and I do not have permission from her to tell it. As I think about this problem, I am coming to the conclusion that the only thing for it is for you children to make friends with the Gorgon yourselves.”


Alexander felt alarmed, and the rest of the children looked at each other nervously; but Annabel had been extremely curious about the Gorgon ever since Alexander had had his run-in with her, so she spoke up. "I think that's a lovely idea, Grandmother. When can we meet her?"


"Well, first off, anyone who wants to be friends with a Gorgon is going to have to get a pair of Magical Corrective Lenses.”


The children’s parents exchanged glances at this announcement, but the children did not notice this.


“What are Magical Corrective Lenses please, Grandmother?” asked Annabel.

“They are a kind of lens which allows you to see certain things as they truly are. My own reading spectacles are a variety of Magical Corrective Lenses, though normally I just use them for reading the fine print on medicine bottles and so on.”

Several children started talking at once, but Annabel had learned at school that raising your hand can get a grownup’s attention when nothing else seems to be able to, so she did this now. “Yes, Annabel?” asked her grandmother.

“Why couldn’t we just borrow your magical corrective lenses?” asked Annabel.


“Because the magical part only works for the person for whom the Corrective Lenses have been made,” said grandmother.

Now Annabel turned to her parents, pleading. “Couldn’t I get a pair? Pleease?”

Her parents looked grave. “It isn’t just a matter of going down to the grocery store and getting a pair,” said Griselda, her mother. “I don’t even know if there is anyone around who makes them anymore. And even if there is someone around, it can be quite expensive to get a pair.”

“If Grandmother thinks it would be worth it to be friends with a gorgon, and if getting magical corrective lenses is what we have to do to make friends with the gorgon, then I am willing to spend all of my Birthday money and all of my Christmas money on it,” said Annabel.

The other children were pretty amazed by this. Making friends with the gorgon did seem like an interesting project, but they weren’t sure that it would be worth spending good Christmas and Easter money on.

“If that’s how you feel, I’ll start looking on the Internet tomorrow for a shop,” said their mother.



And that was what she did. She found one the next morning, and it wasn’t even that far away. It was a little shop that was tucked between the book shop they liked to frequent and a cobbler’s shop they always hurried past as fast as they could, because the cobbler didn’t like children very much (especially vampire children), and would yell at them if they got too close to his shoes (and this wasn’t very close).

As they pushed through the front door, a little bell dinged. A few seconds later, Annabel could see something—a tuft of hair?—coming out from the back of the shop; but she couldn’t see much more, because whoever it was was hidden by a counter which was almost taller than Annabel.

Finally he was close enough that the tuft had turned in to a face. “Mr. Rufus Ferner, at your service; and with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking this afternoon?”

“Griselda the Witch, and my daughter, Annabel,” said Annabel’s mother.


Annabel was a very well-raised child, and she knew very well the rules of politeness, but she wasn’t sure which one applied here: the pair of spectacles he was wearing was so extraordinary looking that she wanted to stare at it, but she knew that staring was rude. On the other hand, she knew that it was also rude not to look someone in the eye when you were meeting them. She felt frustrated as she realized she had already stared for several seconds, so then she made up her mind immediately, and stared at the floor.

"What do you want?" asked Mr. Ferner.

 "I would like to get a pair of Magical Corrective Lenses for myself, please," she said.

"YOU want to get Magical Corrective Lenses?" he asked Annabel, sounding very shocked. "WHY?" And he came around the counter to see her face to face.


"My grandmother is friends with a gorgon and I want to make friends with the gorgon too, and grandmother said that I should get Magical Corrective Lenses so that I can."

"Hmph. They're very expensive, you know."

"Yes, I know. I have all of my allowance here, and I am willing to bring in all of my allowance all summer so that I can get them."

They looked at each other for a moment.

"Well. I appreciate the offer, but magical corrective lenses are a great deal more expensive than THAT." He shuffled back around the counter and struggled for a moment to pull open a drawer. "Ah! Here it is." He held up what looked like a seed packet; it had a picture of a red flower on front, and the bottom of it bulged out a little. "This is my second-to-last fire-flower seed. Fire-flowers are extremely rare and valuable. If you will grow this seed in to a grown-up fireflower, then the fire-flower will produce two seeds. You may keep one for yourself, but bring the other one back to me, and I will make you the magical corrective lenses. I warn you, it will be very difficult."

"I would like to try anyway, thank you. I will ask my Grandmother Hildegaard for help."

"Hmph. Well. You're one of Hildegaard's grandchildren then, are you? Them there is some chance you will succeed." He studied her face very carefully for several seconds, and she tried not to squirm. "Would you like to have a look at mine?” he asked.

Annabel looked up with a huge grin on her face that said, “yes,” and Mr. Ferner took the spectacles off and handed them to her. “You can put them on if you’d like,” he said.

And by now you are really wondering what those spectacles looked like, and I am going to tell you, if I can manage. If anyone can draw me a picture, that would be most handy. At any rate, the spectacles looked a little bit like a carnival mask, if you have ever seen one, only instead of fancy glittery mask, the part that was spread out was made of lenses. All of the lenses were attached to hinges, so that they could be slid down in to place in front of the wearer’s eyes, or slid out of place, as the wearer wished.

Annabel put on the spectacles and looked up at her mother. At the moment, only the basic, first-level lenses were in place, but her mother looked pretty much like she always did. Annabel slid a set of lenses in to place; her mother now looked quite glowy, and Mr. Ferner’s hair had turned black instead of the white it was in real life. When she looked around the room, she saw-- well, I am getting distracted from the real story. Perhaps someone could draw a before-and-after picture of the shop, too.

Annabel took the Magical Corrective lenses off and handed them back very carefully to the Magical Corrective Lens Maker. "Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome," he replied, and then he said "good luck," and Annabel knew that this was his way of saying that she should leave, so she carefully tucked the seed packet in to her coat pocket, and then went outside with her mother.

The Vampire Story I promised

I told Sroon on Saturday night that I would write up a vampire story. I'll get around to writing the back story eventually, but for now I'm just writing the new one.

Once upon a time, after Rupert and Griselda got married, they had four children. I think that I might have already named the children, but I've forgotten what I named them, so I'm just going to rename them and you guys can remind me of what the real names are when I get back (or in a comment on this posting). The little boy vampire that I am going to tell this story about was named Alexander.

Alexander was seven years old, and he loved to help his mother. One day, his mother, Griselda, decided to send him on an errand to her mother, whose name was Hildegaard. Hildegaard was an avid gardener (that means that she liked to garden a lot), and Alexander's mom was trying to grow a very particular kind of plant, called Dragon's Tongue, but her plant was turning brown on the edges and purple in the middle of the leaves. She asked Alexander if he could take a leaf to his Grandma Hildegaard so that she could tell them what was wrong with it, and Alexander immediately said yes. Not only was he a helpful boy, he also liked to visit his grandmother.

His mother packed a lunch for him, gave him a couple of levitation spells and invisibility spells and things like that in case he ran in to any trouble, and sent him on his way. He walked past the castle where Robert the vampire and Tatyana the ice skater lived with their children, past the lake where Tatyana and the children ice skated in the winter, and in to the deep, dark woods.

Almost as soon as he stepped on the path, he heard someone crying. It was another little vampire boy; in fact, it was his friend Robbie, who was Robert and Tatyana's son.

"Why are you crying?" he asked. Robert said that he had some magic locusts that his mother had packed for him as a treat in his lunch, but he had lost them in the woods and he was sad that he wasn't going to get to eat them. Alexander knew that his own mother had packed some magic locusts in his lunch, so he offered Robbie a few. Robbie smiled and said yes, and they decided to eat them together. There was one left over after they had both eaten what they wanted, so Alexander decided to save it for later.

After they ate, Alexander went on his way. As he was walking, he saw a Big Bad Wolf coming towards him on the path! Big Bad Wolves think that vampires are some of the yummiest things they can eat, but they don't get to eat them very often. They only eat little vampires, when they can catch them alone.

Alexander didn't want to be seen or caught or eaten, so he quickly took out some vanishing powder and sprinkled it over his head and the leaf he was carrying. Alexander tiptoed a little to the side of the path as he walked past. The wolf put up his head and sniffed. "Mmm, that's a good smell!" he said. "That smells like a little vampire to me!" and he started sniffing closer and closer to Alexander. Alexander knew that any second now, the wolf would sniff him out, so he wasted no time in pulling out a speedy-spell miniature broom from his pocket. It was one of the things his mother had sent with him in case he got in to trouble.

"Speedy spell, speedy spell, make me go fast!" he said, and held on tight to the little whisk broom. The broom would have jumped out of his hands, because it went so fast, but he held on tight and it did make him go fast. The wolf was also going fast, and almost caught him, but then he came to a fork in the path and went to the right (which was towards his grandmother's house), and luckily the wolf went left. Unfortunately, as he was rushing down the path to get away from the wolf, he accidentally ran into a gorgon!

"What is that?! Watch where you're going!" said the gorgon. Alexander didn't turn to stone when he looked at her because he was invisible, and that is one of the effects of invisibility. However, he didn't want to be rude, so he pulled out some visibility powder and sprinkled it on himself (but he put on some sunglasses first, so that he wouldn't be turned to stone after he became visible).

"I'm so very sorry, Miss Gorgon. I wasn't watching where I was going. I was running from a Big Bad Wolf."

"Harrumph. That's no good reason to be running into delicate old ladies!"

"I'm very sorry," he said, even though he wasn't sure if he really could have avoided it. As I mentioned, he was trying to be polite, and he knew that sometimes being polite means listening to someone say something that you don't think is true, without correcting the person. Besides which, it was true that he was sorry to have run into her, whether or not it could have been avoided.

"Could I do anything to help you feel better?" he asked.

"Not really," she said. She really was very grumpy. "Not unless you can make my lunch of sour slug soup reappear. It spilled all over the ground when you bumped in to me." He looked down and saw that this was true; a little kettle of soup was tipped over on its side on the ground. Only about a tablespoon of soup was left in it.

"Oh! I would feel sad if my soup spilled, too. You know, I still have one magic locust left from my lunch," he said. "Would you like to eat it?" He had kind of wanted to eat that locust, but he felt that it was better to not offend the gorgon than to eat the locust.

"Hmm... maybe," she said. She took the locust from his hand and sniffed it. Her eyes grew big as she noticed how tasty it smelled, and then she popped it into her mouth and swallowed it in one gulp. "Do you have any more?" she asked, because she was not polite.

"Um, no, I'm very sorry, I don't," said Alexander.

"OK. Well, I guess that I'll be on my way then," said the Gorgon, and then she whistled, and that big bad wolf came right to her side! But she didn't let the wolf eat Alexander, so he was especially glad that he had been polite to her.

A little further down the path was his grandmother's house, and he stepped inside and gave her a hug. "Grandmother! You wouldn't believe what happened! I met a Big Bad Wolf, and then I met a Gorgon, and I gave her my last magic locust, but she didn't even say thank you, and the wolf was her pet, and it was scary!"

His grandmother smiled at him. "It's sometimes hard when other people aren't polite even when you are. I am proud of you. Now, did I hear you say that you gave my friend the Gorgon your last magic locust? I saved some from the last batch I caught, especially for you. Would you like to eat them now?"

"Yes."

And so Alexander sat down at his grandmother's kitchen table, and ate the magic locust she had saved for him and watched her perform tests on the leaf he had brought, and wondered why his grandmother was friends with a rude Gorgon. I know the answers to these questions, but that is a story that I will tell another day.

The Vampire Story told by a Fairly Victorian Auntie

One of my young nephews consistently asks for at least one of (and often all of) three kinds of stories: princess stories, vampire stories, and witch stories. He also prefers made up stories, which are the kind that stretch my brain very far, especially when its elasticity has been worn out by a long hard day at work. But for what it's worth, here is the vampire story I told the other night.

Rupert the Vampire and the Three Kittens

Once upon a time, there was a vampire who lived in a little house in the woods, far away from other vampires and witches and goblins and stuff. He had one cat and three kittens, and he would watch the kittens doing the silly things that kittens do and he would laugh and laugh until he fell off his chair and tears ran down his face.

There was another vampire in the woods who thought that it was very improper for the kitten-loving vampire to have these kittens (the kitten-lover's name was Rupert); in fact, he thought that it was so improper that he decided to kidnap Rupert's kittens. He put them in a high tower, in a castle that was outside of the woods, and he put a forgetting spell around the tower, and he put a forgetting spell on Rupert which was so strong that Rupert even forgot his own name.

Rupert did remember, however, that he had a friend who was a witch who knew how to break forgetting spells, and he could remember how to get to her house, so he went. She could see right away what the trouble was. She told him that the best way to break a forgetting spell was to start remembering things. She asked if he could remember any pieces of poetry. He couldn't. She asked if he could remember his times tables. He couldn't. She asked if he could
remember his alphabet. He thought he might.

"Let's see. A, B, D-- no, no, that's not it. A, B, ummmm... C, uh, F, G,H, no, no. A, B, C, D, E! Yes! F, G, H!" And then he was able to remember the rest of his alphabet, in order.

Next, he tried his times tables. "One times one is two. One times two is two..." and a little later he said, "Six times seven is forty-two. Six times eight is forty-eight..." and so on until he had said all of his times tables.

He wanted to go on to poetry next, but his friend, Griselda the Witch, thought that all he needed now would be to remember his name (she didn't know about the other forgetting spell).

"Rupert!"

And with that he set off to find his kittens.

He didn't have to look very hard, because the other vampire hadn't thought that he would break the forgetting spell, and he had left a very clear path in the woods of scratched tree bark and blood, because the kittens had been biting and scratching the whole way as he kidnapped them.

When he got to the top of the tower where they were, he ran in to the second forgetting spell, but this time he knew how to break it.

"A, Z, B... nope. A, B. Yes. A, B, C, D, Z. No. A, B, C, D, E, F..." and he remembered the rest of the alphabet, and he remembered the times tables through twelve, and he thought about reciting Beowulf, but instead he just remembered that his name was Rupert and that he had come for his kittens, and he stepped inside the door of the tower (it wasn't even locked) and gathered up his kittens in his arms and carried them home.

After he got home, he put a forgetting spell around his own house so strong that if someone walked through it, they would forget that they even had a name, let alone what the name was, but he was careful to leave a hole so that he and his friends could go in and out with their memories intact, as long as they remembered the password.

And that is the end of that story.

Princess Anabel and the Self-Cleaning Castle

Once upon a time, there lived a princess named Princess Anabel who was so helpful and kind that one day, when one of the third-floor maids was sick and couldn't come to work, Princess Anabel offered to help the other maid clean that floor. She worked very hard all day long, and at the end of the day, as she was beating out a rug, she happened to come across a rug fairy.

This rug fairy's rug had not been properly cleaned in some time, and she was so pleased that Princess Anabel was doing it that she offered the Princess a wish. Princess Anabel, being helpful and kind as she was, asked for a self-cleaning castle.

The fairy granted her wish, and this is how it worked: whenever Princess Anabel wanted the castle to be cleaned, she would step out of the kitchen door, and there she should press a button which looked a little bit like a doorbell, but which was really a self-cleaning button. She should stay outside for at least one hour, and then she was free to come back in the castle again. However, there was one rule: she could never be in the castle when that button was pushed. The fairy didn't say exactly what would happen if this rule was broken, but she warned Princess Anabel very sternly about it, and so Princess Anabel promised her that she would never be inside when the button was pushed.

All went swimmingly for the next few months, but then Princess Anabel's pen pal (really a pen suitor; they were becoming interested in marrying each other) decided to come for a visit. His name was Prince Rupert. He knew from her letters that Princess Anabel enjoyed helping in the kitchen, so he decided to surprise her by coming around to the kitchen door. Sure enough, he pressed what he thought was the doorbell, never knowing that it was the castle-cleaning button, which no one but Princess Anabel was supposed to touch.

Inside the kitchen, Princess Anabel was just reaching for a carton of eggs when all of a sudden she turned into a pile of glittery dust. When Prince Rupert heard the screaming of the other people in the kitchen, he rushed inside, and when they explained to him what he had (accidentally) done, he was very sorry indeed. They swept the Anabel-dust into a pile and then used a funnel to put it into a canning jar so that Prince Rupert could take it with him on his quest to find a cure for dustification.

I will not trouble you with the details of Prince Rupert's long and arduous journey to the island of the dragons (perhaps I will tell you another time). I hope you remember that dragons are very wise and often know the solutions to magical problems. Suffice it to say, once he got there, he was told that he should add five drops of blue food coloring, four drops of red food coloring, three tears from a boy who was crying for his mother, and two drops of almond extract, and his princess would be restored.

He followed the instructions exactly, and Anabel did come back-- but the trouble was, she was only about as tall as a pencil.

That's when they thought of going to the rug fairy again. Prince Rupert worked all day long, scrubbing floors, dusting knicknacks, and (of course) beating out rugs, and finally at the end of the day, another rug fairy appeared to him. (You must know that rug fairys are seldom found at the beginning of a work day; usually, if they appear, it will be at the end of a long day of cleaning.)

The rug fairy was perfectly happy to grant his wish, and in an instant, Anabel was back as good as new (or, to be precise, as good as she had been about three weeks earlier). Princess Anabel and Prince Rupert courted for another month, but they had already been writing letters to each other for three years, so it did not take them long to see that they really did like each other well enough to marry each other, and so another month after that, the marriage took place.

In preparation for the marriage, Princess Anabel instituted a very generous hiring policy for castle-cleaners, because it was now well-known in her land that her castle was full of rug-fairies. Her rule was that whoever wanted to work for one day cleaning the castle would be hired to do so, and they would be allowed to keep whatever wishes they were offered in the line of duty. About twenty people got wishes in this way, and several of them chose to have self-cleaning houses, themselves. They were very careful, however, to put very large signs next to the self cleaning buttons, which read: "ABSOLUTELY NO ONE EXCEPT [here they would put the name of the person] IS ALLOWED TO PUSH THIS BUTTON, ON PAIN OF DEATH." They didn't really mean the "on pain of death" part, but they wanted people to know they were serious.

Princess Nice Girl Has Just Become a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story

This is because it is largely the creation of my nephew, EE, who has first rights over the story. During a recent visit to my home, he spent most of the time telling me the further adventures of his princess-- and he took the story in a completely different direction than I had envisioned (see below). I, for my part, was sort of attached to the way I was taking things, so I decided that a choose-your-own- adventure might be the best route.

Turns out that Princess Nice Girl's parents are really aliens who are trying to take over the earth; Princess Nice Girl is actually the only one who (with one of her superpowers, which is hidden from her parents) can shoot down their little henchmen-robots. I am unclear on whether this superpower came from a beam, or is a (laser) beam, or both. She also has a superpower of hearing anyone who is screaming for a house.

She is in the book The Only Superhero Who Can Save The World.

She has a magical axe, which can cut down mountains just by touching them, and the mountains turn in to wood, which she can then build houses with. I commented that they must make an awful lot of wood. He said that yes, it was enough to build a whole city, and that it was even enough to build a tower to Mars.

He drew illustrations of all this for me while I was taking a nap-- I have but to get the pictures, a scanner, and a computer-with-working-internet all in one place, now. He also decided that Princess Nice Girl's hair was yellow. I have seen the picture (I promise to scan it in for you, very, very soon), and I can personally report that it is indeed yellow, and not anything like blonde.

Actually, truth be told, the pictures are how this whole thing started-- I desperately needed a nap, so I sat him down at the kitchen table with drawing supplies and instructions to wake me up only if he really needed me. Let it be a warning to you: crazy things can happen when you let a five-year-old loose with colored pencils and blank paper.

In related news, EE's cousin, T, read the original story and liked it, but decided that Princess Nice Girl was not quite the right name. She will be letting me know of acceptable alternatives any time now-- I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Princess Amethyst, Part 1

(An Amethyst is a name for a light purple quartz stone; it is “semiprecious”.)

[This is a story I have told a couple of times to my niece, EM (who is seven and highly enamored of fairies), and which I promised her would be the next thing to go up on the blog. As usual, I’ve embellished as I’ve written it out, and I am looking for help with various bits and pieces—I’ll say exactly which ones at the end.]

ONCE upon a time, in a tiny kingdom by the sea, there lived a beautiful princess named Princess Amethyst. Actually, the kingdom was so tiny that the only people in it were Amethyst, her parents, and the servants in the castle where they lived. There was a huge forest which grew right up to the castle gates, and there were houses in the forest—actually, it was strange, because more than a few of the trees were growing right through the rooftops of the houses. But none of the houses were inhabited, and none of them had been inhabited since before Amethyst had been born.

Now, Amethyst loved to read, and as she grew older, she especially loved to read stories about other princesses in other lands, and she quickly noticed that every single one of these princesses had a kingdom which was larger than one castle. She was not a naturally envious girl, so at first this did not bother her at all; but eventually, she began to wonder if there might not be some other explanation for the fact that hers was the tiniest kingdom, people-wise, that she had ever heard of. Finally she asked her parents.

“Father, why are the only people in our kingdom the people who live in the castle with us?” she asked at dinner one night.

Her father looked at her mother and raised his eyebrows, and then turned to answer her. “Well, actually, the people in the castle aren’t the only people in the kingdom.”

“They aren’t?”

“No. Three years before you were born, an evil witch came to our kingdom. She wanted our court magician to give her a spell for growing a special kind of fruit which would kill many people very quickly. When he refused, she started to fight him. The battle lasted for many hours. At the end of it, she cast a spell that would turn every person it touched in to a tree. The court magician shielded himself and the people in the castle, but he wasn’t able to protect the people outside of the castle. They all turned in to trees.”

Amethyst was riveted by this story. “What happened to the witch?”

“The protection spell which our magician cast also turned the witch’s spell against her. She turned in to a tree along with everyone else. The tree she turned in to is the only tree we have chopped down in the last twenty years. We chopped it down and we burned it, and we dug out the roots and burned them. It made a terrible smell, but we wanted to be sure the witch would be really gone.”

“What about the other trees?”

“Didn’t you ever wonder why the gardener position was the most important one in the kingdom? Do you remember that when our old one retired, we brought in a new one from another kingdom, one who had been university-educated in taking care of trees? He is in charge of taking care of our people. You also know that we have a rule that we don’t chop down any wood to make fires with. We only take wood which has fallen from the trees by itself.”

Amethyst had wondered why, in the very cold winter, her parents were always so careful about this rule. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

This time her mother spoke up. “Because we knew that once you knew about the curse, you would try to break it. That was part of the spell that the magician cast.”

“So, how do I break it?”

“We don’t know. You should probably ask the magician.”


The next day, she went to visit the magician. He told her that he didn’t know either, and that the only thing he could think of would be to visit the dragons who lived on the end of the archipelago which went out from their little castle-kingdom, and ask them. There were six other islands between the edge of the kingdom and the island of the dragons.

Amethyst went back to her parents and asked for a ship so that she could go out to the island of the dragons, so that she could ask them how to break the spell. At first her parents refused, because she was still so young, but she pleaded with them for a year and a day, and some time shortly after her eighteenth birthday (on which she had, very strangely, received no presents), her parents took her to the harbor and showed her a ship which they had bought with all of their savings, so that she could go visit the island of the dragons.

The very next morning, Amethyst set sail on the ship.

The first island they came to was the island of the queen of the fairies.

[Very sorry—I’m just going to have to post this, uncompleted. What do you think the name of the court magician should be? There are seven islands, but I don’t remember what is on five of them (this part of the story is approximately loosely based on The Odyssey)—what do you think there should be? I think that the gardener’s handsome son should come along, but I’m not sure what his name is or what role he plays. I also think that he might be younger than Princess Amethyst, but I’m not sure.]

A Story With A Princess

[Note: for privacy's sake, I will refer to my relatives by their initials, and not even always by their real ones.]

A month or so ago, I was asking my five-year-old nephew, E.E.H., what kind of story he wanted me to tell, and he said that he wanted a princess story. I asked him what kind of princess story, and then he proceeded to tell me basically the story you find below. I have added to the ending, with the help of E.E.H.'s mother, as well as another of my sisters, K.H., and her daughter, T.H. Even now, as you can tell, I'm not so sure about the ending. Comments (especially in the form of suggestions about where to take the story from here) are welcome.

ONCE upon a time, there was a princess named Princess Nice Girl (because her parents couldn’t think of anything else to call her, and she really was a nice girl).

One day, when Princess Nice Girl was walking in the woods, she saw Santa Claus. “Hi, Santa Claus!” she said, but Santa Claus didn’t answer back because just then a dragon came and ate him up, and then flew off to his mountain!

Princess Nice girl saw that Santa’s sleigh was sitting there, with the sack of presents in it, and the reindeer all hitched up to it. Oddly enough there was a Santa Claus costume inside of the sleigh, complete with a fake white beard and white hair. Princess Nice Girl talked to the reindeer, and they agreed that she would pretend to be Santa Claus that night, so she put on the costume and flew all around the world, giving presents to everyone, and no one knew that it was her instead of the real Santa Claus, because she had the costume on.

Actually, one person did know, and that was her best friend, Minerva. Minerva thought that Princess Nice Girl should get a present, too, so when Princess Nice Girl got back, Minerva gave her a magical suit of armor and a magic sword. Princess Nice Girl put on the armor and took the sword, and then used the reindeer and sleigh to get to the mountain where the dragon lived.

She had been planning to fight the dragon, but she didn’t have to; unbeknownst to her, the dragon had started feeling sick almost as soon as he ate Santa Claus, and right as she was flying up to the cave, he threw up Santa Claus, a fish, and a pony.

Now, Santa Claus really is a very nice person, and as soon as he had washed himself off in a nearby stream and thanked Princess Nice Girl, he asked the dragon what had made him do such a horrible thing as eat him. The dragon explained that he really was a nice dragon, and he didn’t like to eat people because they tasted bad. He usually ate sheep. Lately, however, the people who owned the sheep had been getting better and better at defending them, and the dragon ate fewer and fewer sheep, and then finally he wasn’t able to catch any at all to eat, so he had gone crazy with hunger and had eaten things he almost never ate: a fish, a pony, and then finally Santa Claus.

As I said, Santa Claus really is a nice person, and he felt sad for the dragon as he listened to his story. He decided that he would give the dragon all of his spare Christmas chocolate for then (which was a lot of chocolate); and then every year after that, he would bring the dragon food to eat as a Christmas present. However, he could not allow the dragon to go around eating people, even if he was very hungry, so he asked the dragon to promise not to do it again (which the dragon was happy to do). Santa Claus also suggested to the dragon that if he was Princess Nice Girl’s servant, then Princess Nice Girl would have to pay him enough that he could eat.

Princess Nice Girl said that she would have to ask her parents if she could keep the dragon. The dragon decided that he would like to give her a ride back home, and she agreed. When she got there, her parents decided to let him stay, if he would agree to help evaluate Princess Nice Girl's suitors, of whom there were many. I know that you would like to know more about that, but you will just have to wait until another time.