![]() ![]() There simply isn’t room, in these books about survivalism, for more than one pious feast day a year. Laura and Mary are delighted by tiny Christmas cakes made with pristine white sugar and white flour instead of the everyday brown they dutifully ask Pa to purchase workhorses for Christmas instead of spending money on buying them presents. ![]() So while Wilder always makes room in her narrative for a Christmas scene or two, the celebration is usually pointedly minimal, the better to set off the Ingallses’ austere morality. Thanksgiving should be entirely up their alley.īut the Little House books are also about deprivation and hunger, about how for the Ingalls family luxuries are always scarce, and even necessities aren’t exactly abundant. They take an almost pornographic pleasure in describing butter-churning and hog-slaughtering and corn-harvesting. ![]() The Little House books are obsessed with food and patriotism, and what is Thanksgiving but our national excuse to indulge in both in equal measure? These books are designed to codify the myth of the self-sufficient pioneers, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living off the fat of the land. ![]() But in the entire nine-volume saga, there are only two Thanksgiving scenes. You might think that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s immortal Little House books would suit our purposes perfectly. And it can be helpful, when holidays don’t feel quite right, to return to the holidays of children’s literature, where everything is codified and comfortably familiar. ![]()
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