Stating something obvious, but unsaid is called "mentioning the elephant in the room." This New Year's elephant, leaving 2020 for 2021, deserves considering. Artists have a way of putting things in many ways, including t-shirts and posters. An artist calling himself MoTasS on Redbubble.com created this poster and it's also on t-shirts there.
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| Poster & tees on Redbubble.com by MoTasS |
I found a New Year's story also related to coping with seeing either the positives or negatives in life. It's called "The Three Bells" and I found an illustration that led me to more information I'll give later. The story matches my long-time wondering how people living near churches ringing bells feel about it.
That "The End" is for the entire book, Holiday-Time Stories by Edna Groff Deihl. While Deihl wrote several books for children, the only online information I could find was her Harrisburg, Pennsylvania grave and she lived from 1881-1935. She also isn't remembered in print biographical reference works on children's authors. This book never had its 1930 copyright renewed. It's rather like the bell that stopped ringing as it entered the Thirties, a decade those of us leaving 2020 should remember.
This past year has had so many leave us forever, it has been hard to remember them all. I know churches have gotten creative in continuing their services, many can be found online at YouTube and some continue in-person in parking lots. I don't know if church bells continue to ring at their usual times or possibly extra as a memorial. The three bells shown at the beginning of today's post came from a Chicago Tribune article on how churches in that area rang a memorial back in April. Remember April was when the current pandemic was looking its worst while we tried to "flatten the curve." Now winter has brought both the hope of starting vaccine shots and the despair of far larger spikes in deaths. May the end of one year and the start of another bring remembrance and reflection in many ways.
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- There are many online resources for Public Domain stories, maybe none for folklore is as ambitious as fellow storyteller, Yoel Perez's database, Yashpeh, the International Folktales Collection. I have long recommended it and continue to do so. He has loaded Stith Thompson's Motif Index into his server as a database so you can search the whole 6 volumes for whatever word or expression you like by pressing one key. http://folkmasa.org/motiv/motif.htm
- You may have noticed I'm no
longer certain Dr. Perez has the largest database, although his
offering the Motif Index certainly qualifies for those of us seeking
specific types of stories. There's another site, FairyTalez
claiming to be the largest, with "over 2000 fairy tales,
folktales, and fables" and they are "fully optimized for
phones, tablets, and PCs", free and presented without ads.
Between those two sites, there is much for story-lovers, but as they say in infomercials, "Wait, there's more!"
- Zalka Csenge Virag - http://multicoloreddiary.blogspot.com doesn't give the actual stories, but her recommendations, working her way through each country on a continent, give excellent ideas for finding new books and stories to love and tell.
You're going to find many of the links on these sites have gone down, BUT go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find some of these old links. Tim's site, for example, is so huge probably updating it would be a full-time job. In the case of Story-Lovers, it's great that Jackie Baldwin set it up to stay online as long as it did after she could no longer maintain it. Possibly searches maintained it. Unfortunately Storytell list member, Papa Joe is on both Tim Sheppard's site and Story-Lovers, but he no longer maintains his old Papa Joe's Traveling Storytelling Show website and his Library (something you want to see!) is now only on the Wayback Machine. It took some patience working back through claims of snapshots but finally in December of 2006 it appears!
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