I haven't read this series in decades, and yet I still remember so much. I should do a reread over the summer.

Of course I read this, both as a child and as an adult to my own daughter. I wished Pa and Ma had been my own parents . . . These books were the joy of my childhood.

I started reading this set to my school kids. We are on the second book. These books are timeless and the kids love them. When I pulled out Little House in the Big Woods and told them it was our next storytime book, I got waving hands and big smiles. They said things like, "I love those books," and "Those are my favorite books."

I have read all the books my favorite was the first four years and little town on the prairie in the first four years Laura gets married.

Childhood in a box set

I really wish I had read this as a young girl, but sadly, I was the right age for the TV show then and never considered picking up the books. I always thought the show and the books were essentially the same, but as an adult, I understand how rare that truly ever is. Anyway, I had an opportunity to listen to the series' audiobooks and remembered how much I loved the show, so I gave it a go. I loved the audiobooks. The narrator was great--how she sang all those songs still confounds me. The romance was so sweet--something I would have adored as a young reader--but different than the romance portrayed in the TV show. I still couldn't help seeing the books through my memories of the TV show. The actors ARE the characters in my minds; there's no way to NOT imagine Melissa Gilbert and Michael Landon as the MCs. And to this day, Dean Butler still makes me swoon.

If nothing else, the books confirmed for me that I could never be a pioneer. There's no question that I'll be one of the first eaten by zombies in the coming apocalypse....

Domestic life back in the day might not be quite as cozy or cornucopia as these stories suggest. But I worked out my own personal truths about the Little House Books and why the stories live in my blood. It’s my way of making peace with yet another childhood relic facing the wrath of actuality.

Truth #1. Christmas is always better in a log cabin on the prairie when you have nothing.

Remember Mr. Edwards crossing the wild creek to bring the Christmas presents from Santa Claus? Remember the new tin cup, the stick of peppermint candy, a heart-shaped cake? Remember Ma asking them if their stockings were empty?

“Then they put their hands down inside them to make sure. And in the very toe of each stocking was a shining bright, new penny! They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny. There never had been such a Christmas.”

Let’s face it, if you’re ecstatic about receiving a penny, albeit a shiny penny, you live in an entirely different universe than the one today with expectant kids opening smart phones, x-box machines, and six hundred piece Lego sets. Christmas on the frontier lacked frantic materialism. Laura understood at a very basic level the difference between nothing and something, between molasses and white sugar, between poverty and a penny.

In each book, Christmas is always a monumental event usually with its own chapter that never fails to create a sort of pithy yearning in the modern reader. The chapter usually includes such details as Pa whittling flowers and birds into a wood bracket for Ma, Laura receiving Charlotte her first rag doll, the aforementioned pennies, the Boasts showing up on Christmas Eve at Silver Lake, the secret makings of mittens, neckties, aprons, and handkerchiefs knitted of thin lawn, the Youth’s Companions saved to read on Christmas day, cans of oysters which apparently were quite a treat, popped kernels, Almanzo coming from Minnesota with oranges, and my favorite- the Christmas tree at the church with the little fur cape and muff saved for Laura. The very fur cape and muff that upstage the infamous Nellie Oleson.

Oh to be content with a penny of your very own! To have a moment fully realized, to yearn for nothing else. For sheer joy to wash down to your bones. To be content with a one room cabin, Pa-made furniture, and white sugar only when company came. To find your true gifts in the natural world: The rippling grass and enormous sky. The plum thickets and cattle paths. The sheet of silver water and tall wild grass of Silver Lake. The tangles of wild grapevines and wind blowing through the cottonwoods. Gifts savored with appetites void of distractions, without the clutter of too many presents under the tree.

Truth #2- Don’t believe everything you read about Pa.

I love Pa. I might have even been in love with him at some point with his wild hair and fiddle playing and his “Where’s my little half-pint of sweet cider half drunk up?” Seriously, Pa could do anything. Build a log cabin, fashion furniture from trees, dig a well, construct a fish trap with scraps of wood, twist hay into sticks for burning, follow the clothesline to the stable to feed the livestock during a blizzard, cross a roaring creek, outsmart a pack of wolves, survive for three days in a snow bank during a blizzard, play the fiddle like a choke cherry tree quivering in the wind, melt lead to make bullets, kill animals to feed his family, build the rocking chair of all rocking chairs for Ma, win the town spelling bee, trap and skin animals, plow a wheat field, plow a corn field, save the house from a prairie fire.

However, on the internet, there are certain innuendos about Pa. Quite a few bloggers attribute the family’s several moves and financial loses as proof that Pa was either a good-for-nothing lazybones or an opportunist charlatan.

“So in reality, Pa ends up being rather a jerk,” one blogger opined.

Be still my heart. If Pa wasn’t a decent, hard-working guy wouldn’t the entire premise of the stories falls apart?

In the books, there is always a really good reason for the moving ons and starting overs and Laura certainly didn’t seem to mind them since she personified wanderlust. In the big woods, the land was settling up and food was becoming scarce. No more bears and deer meat to survive those long winter months. The Indians and the government drove them from the little house on the prairie. And surely Pa couldn’t be held responsible for the plague of grasshoppers that devoured his wheat crop on the very eve of harvest while they lived on the banks of Plum Creek. Later, the long winter stalled their homestead progress and blackbirds ate the corn.

In reality, there might be some truth in the assertion of Pa’s opportunistic tendencies. Apparently, he knew the land in Kansas wasn’t cleared to be settled yet. There’s also the part between Plum Creek and Silver Lake when Laura and Mary worked in a hotel in Burr Oak, Iowa and boarded with other people. I can’t imagine Pa and Ma paying rent and not living in spaces as wide and vast as a prairie. With this knowledge, I thought it rather interesting when I reread the following in the first chapter of Little Town. Pa has just asked Laura if she’d like to work in town. To which Ma exclaims, “No, Charles, I won’t have Laura working out in a hotel among all kinds of strangers.”

“Who said such a thing?” Pa demanded. “No girl of ours’ll do that, not while I’m alive and kicking.”

But apparently two girls of his did do exactly that while he was alive and kicking.

So Pa was a complicated man and maybe not as idyllic as the books suggest. Still, Laura chose to portray Pa as hardworking, witty, brave, larger-than-life. Maybe he’s the Pa Laura wanted or believed or remembered. I’m sure in actuality Charles Ingalls was somewhere in between the good-for-nothing bloke and mighty Paul Bunyon. It’s a bit reassuring that he might not have been king of the castle in everyway. (He did dwindle down to skin and bones during the long winter and could be found cursing the wind and snow.) I’ve made my own peace in the realization that it doesn’t matter to me if the real Charles Ingalls was this way or that way. I have Pa from the books and that is the way I choose to remember him. Even if fictional, Pa fulfilled a vital purpose in my young life. He personified the kind, fierce father, the protector of little girls. He took them to abandoned Indian camps and carried deserted beads home in his handkerchief. He knew the answers to vital questions such as how a panther sounds when it screams and why Laura wanted that Indian papoose with the black eyes. And Pa was brave! Remember when he hit a bear over the head with a club because he didn’t have his gun? (True, the bear ended up being a tree stump that Pa mistook as a bear in the darkening woods but it takes the same amount of courage to attack a tree you honestly believe is a bear as it takes to attack a real bear.)

Truth #3- I was born in the wrong era.

Yep, I mean it. I’m sticking to it. The Little House books have always created a sense of longing in me (and countless other little girls) to live in a log house. And even as an adult, I still wonder if I’ve been cheated by being born into this techno-crazy world. Sure life was hard back then and the thought of an unheated house, baths only once a week and untreatable malaria hardly sounds like a vacation. Still, they had roasted pig’s tail and country dances and buggy-rides!

Despite the abundant amount of information at our fingertips today, there seems a lack of critical thinking, a lack of wisdom. No one I know, including myself, can divide sums without a calculator or recite from memory the entire American history like Laura did at the school exhibition.

In actuality, I’m sure the Ingalls found plenty of tedious moments. For instance, we never hear about the outhouse situation in the little books. Wouldn’t that have caused some serious headache during one of those three day blizzards? And how much of their life was spent fetching water, kneading dough, washing dishes, sewing even stitches on a bodice? Most of their time and energy was spent on providing shelter, warmth, food and clothing. But for me, this single-mindedness is the appeal. There is no therapy like work. They didn’t have time to wonder how their parents ruined their childhood or if they should vaccinate their children or if the food they ate caused cancer. (Although, Ma did believe watermelon caused Fever’n’ague. Pa ate an entire one by himself anyway.) Mostly, they were grateful for food even if it was blackbird pie.

Out on the prairie or in the little town, strangers aided each other in times of illness or distress. People needed each other for survival. I wonder if their perspective focused more on the eternal because death lurked in the corner. Although I’d never say their lives were easier or even simpler, I do believe the reality of their situation forced them to face the bigger questions more often. They dug to the roots of life more often because they had fewer distractions obscuring their view like overgrown ivy. For some reason that sounds mighty appealing to me.

Truth #4- A fictional story is no less beneficial and authentic than a true story.

I think I came to this conclusion early in life, growing up on Narnia and Nancy Drew and Beverly Cleary. Then came Jane Eyre and My Name is Asher Lev and Housekeeping. All books that expanded and latticed my life with beauty. Yet in society, there is generally greater value placed on a true story than on a fictional one. Ask James Frey. A friend once told me she couldn’t justify reading fiction because she wasn’t learning anything. Apparently, fiction equates a lack of truth. In this vein, Laura and her daughter Rose took great pains to assert that every word of the books were true, thus creating the controversy when facts proved otherwise.

Yet stories, true or not, live in our blood and give meaning to our lives. Some of the greatest lessons are taught through fiction. Jesus himself taught eternal truths through parables. I’ve come to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter to me whether every word in the Little House books reflects reality. Maybe it was never the “true” aspect of Little House that bewitched me. Maybe it was the way the books carried me out of the real world and into another “real” world that just might exist because this Laura person really did exist. The stories have become a part of me, as real as a childhood memory. They vibrate in my background like the wind chimes on my front porch. The idea of the log cabin made with Pa’s bare hands (and Ma’s until she sprained her ankle) still tangle up around me like wisteria.

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With Little House, I still find some sort of hoary comfort from reading about maple dripping from trees and squash stacked up in the attic. The stories are rustic safe. The Ingalls experienced hard times, but the stories seem to unfold and move beneath a safe paraffin-like surface. A surface not unlike the glossy pages in the full-colored collector’s set. Nothing scratching their beauty. No matter how many grasshoppers ate the wheat or how many blizzards attacked the house or how many times Nellie called Mary and Laura “country girls,” Ma was always home cooking her baked beans and no yeast bread and Pa’s gun hung over the doorway on two wooden pegs.

Oh, to play catch with a pig’s bladder! To wear a brown poplin to church (and have a cat climb up your hoops) or slide on the ice of Silver Lake and escape the wolves. To sleep in a hay ticked bed. To be thrilled with syrup squiggles in the snow or to wade in a creek with the water-bugs. To draw a dripping bucket of cold, fresh water from the well. To look through an open window at a pack of wolves. To slide down a golden straw-stack or gallop across the land clutching handfuls of a pony’s mane. To hear the horse bells in the frigid air coming to take you away from the horrid Mrs.
Brewster's for the weekend.

My mom read these books to me and all my other siblings at least 10 times, and each time I loved hearing each story! This series is one of the best!

Thoroughly enjoyed these as a child. Without doubt I would look differently at them now.

My teacher gave these to me in first grade. She was impressed that I had taught myself how to read and I was such a well spoken child at an early age. What went wrong with me?

Well these books are an all time classic. I remember staying up all night reading the stories with the blanket over my head and my brothers flashlight shining on the pages. They kept me up all night and I so miss the books, the movies, but even more so the morality that was so simple and logical that it makes me stop wondering what went wrong with me but what went wrong with my country to dispel the fine, outstanding morals of this time and place.

This series was the one that jump started my reading. I almost despised reading up until the day when 8 year-old me picked up “The Little House in the Big Woods” determined that since my older sister had read them so could no matter how much I knew I’d dislike it. In the first chapter I was already enjoying myself. I read one after another of this series and I’ve loved reading ever since (though I’m still not as fast a reader as my sister).
I’ve read through them myself twice since then and also participated in listening most nights when my mom was reading through them to my younger siblings before bed last year.

this was my childhood. (very bold full stop, very big full stop, full stopy stop)