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Christmas at Plum Creek
Posted by Jacquie Bee
on
12:13 PM
in
Family
Over the holidays I was washing dishes with my Mom and we started talking about Christmas movies we liked. Our favourites were Black Christmas (the original with Margot Kidder) and The Muppet Christmas Carol. Last year she bought the Little House on the Prairie Christmas special on DVD but hadn’t watched it until just recently. I was skeptical. I really loved this show as a child but as an adult I think all the overt Christian morality lessons might make me nauseated.
The story of Christmas at Plum Creek is this. Laura has a pony that she loves dearly—a pony that is coveted by the repugnant Nelly Oleson. Now Nelly Oleson still evokes the same disdain in me now as she did when I was 8. Just the thought of her precious blonde ringlets makes me want to bitchslap someone. But I digress…
I’m not sure how Laura even possesses something that Nelly doesn’t have yet (least of all a pony!) but whatever. Nels (Nelly’s slender father and proprietor of Oleson’s Mercantile) of course wants to indulge his spoiled daughter’s every whim and approaches Pa (Charles Ingalls) about the pony. He offers to buy the pony but Pa says no dice.
Meanwhile, back in Walnut Grove, the plucky and observant little half pint notices Ma (Caroline Ingalls) drooling over a stove for sale at Oleson’s Mercantile. A plan begins to form in our heroine’s head:
If I sell my pony to Nelly, I can buy Ma the stove for Christmas. God bless us. Every one.
So Laura sells the pony and gets the stove. The unfortunate part, and the part where my sweetheart of a mother started to weep, was that Pa had been slaving away making Laura a new saddle for her pony. So come Christmas, Caroline gets the stove and Laura gets the homemade saddle for the pony that she sacrificed for the family’s greater good. Of course the secret plan gets revealed to all the Ingalls clan and they revel in Laura’s selfless nature and the magic of Christmas etc., etc., etc. I bet Pa even breaks out the fiddle to celebrate.
Stunned, I asked my mom, “Does Laura get her pony back?”
“Well no, they just all enjoy the Christmas feast together. And then…then it ends.”
Seriously!? I get that it’s a Christmas special and it’s all about giving and family and good Christian values and blah blah blah… but come on! The Ingalls just keep getting shafted! Think about it…Mary goes blind, Albert gets addicted to morphine, Laura loses a baby, the school for the blind that Mary and her husband open burns to the ground…it never ends! But hey, they still have each other, right? Bah.
Fucking Nelly Oleson.
The story of Christmas at Plum Creek is this. Laura has a pony that she loves dearly—a pony that is coveted by the repugnant Nelly Oleson. Now Nelly Oleson still evokes the same disdain in me now as she did when I was 8. Just the thought of her precious blonde ringlets makes me want to bitchslap someone. But I digress…
I’m not sure how Laura even possesses something that Nelly doesn’t have yet (least of all a pony!) but whatever. Nels (Nelly’s slender father and proprietor of Oleson’s Mercantile) of course wants to indulge his spoiled daughter’s every whim and approaches Pa (Charles Ingalls) about the pony. He offers to buy the pony but Pa says no dice.
Meanwhile, back in Walnut Grove, the plucky and observant little half pint notices Ma (Caroline Ingalls) drooling over a stove for sale at Oleson’s Mercantile. A plan begins to form in our heroine’s head:
If I sell my pony to Nelly, I can buy Ma the stove for Christmas. God bless us. Every one.
So Laura sells the pony and gets the stove. The unfortunate part, and the part where my sweetheart of a mother started to weep, was that Pa had been slaving away making Laura a new saddle for her pony. So come Christmas, Caroline gets the stove and Laura gets the homemade saddle for the pony that she sacrificed for the family’s greater good. Of course the secret plan gets revealed to all the Ingalls clan and they revel in Laura’s selfless nature and the magic of Christmas etc., etc., etc. I bet Pa even breaks out the fiddle to celebrate.
Stunned, I asked my mom, “Does Laura get her pony back?”
“Well no, they just all enjoy the Christmas feast together. And then…then it ends.”
Seriously!? I get that it’s a Christmas special and it’s all about giving and family and good Christian values and blah blah blah… but come on! The Ingalls just keep getting shafted! Think about it…Mary goes blind, Albert gets addicted to morphine, Laura loses a baby, the school for the blind that Mary and her husband open burns to the ground…it never ends! But hey, they still have each other, right? Bah.
Fucking Nelly Oleson.
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