<p>One of my favorite teachers read Little House in the Big Woods to our class every day before lunch when I was in 3rd grade, and I have since read every book in the series at least 10 or 15 times. It was a rainy day yesterday at our lake house, so I was picking through a book shelf and came across a biography of her life. </p>
<p>So strange to read that Laura never visited her mother in DeSmet again after her Pa’s funeral in 1902. Her mother died in 1924-and Laura did not attend the funeral! This seems so at odds with her loving descriptions of family and importance of same.</p>
<p>Are there any fans of this author/series on CC, or am I a dinosaur? Lol, none of my friends ever read these books so maybe I am the last of a breed.</p>
<p>I believe the set I got in grade school is still on the shelf in my DD’s room, I was aghast when my girls did not fall in love with the set. I am pretty sure I still know it all by heart.</p>
<p>One of the things I always loved about her books was the recurring theme of the beauty of nature. You’d think that growing up with nature all around you-no big cities, no pollution, just unspoiled countryside, that it would have seemed “normal”-no big deal. But every book is filled with loving descriptions of her surroundings and how much she cherished it and marveled at everything. Perhaps because she wrote the books later in life, during a period where the country and its landscape had changed so much, the descriptions were borne of an appreciation which was realized after the fact.</p>
<p>My daughter went through a big Laura Ingalls phase and even went as her for Halloween for two years. I find it interesting that in her lifetime she went from living out on the prairie to flying in planes.</p>
<p>I wore braids for years as a little girl to be like Laura :)</p>
<p>If you look at the Wikipedia page for Wikipedia page for Caroline Ingalls, you will learn some more facts about her, and it made me wonder even more about their relationship.</p>
<p>I just re-read The Long Winter. I’ve read them all over and over. I read the series to my Mom in the final months of her life. She grew up on the prairies of MN at a time when they still churned butter, had no plumbing, etc. In fact, they had no indoor plumbing until I was a teenager. My grandma cooked on a wood stove and did laundry with a wringer washer.</p>
<p>It would have been that easy to travel between Arkansas and SD in those days.</p>
<p>I was very lucky: I didn’t read them until I was in my 40s, so I think I have a different appreciation of them. I loved them and have reread The Long Winter three or four times. During the winter, I often think of how hard it must have been for her and her family. I am enchanted with the scene of the Christmas meal that they finally had in April, and of the butter that their neighbor brought. It was the first butter they had had in months.</p>
<p>I am also charmed and somewhat shocked that, in the first book, the Christmas presents were new tin cups for Laura and her sister, as well as shiny new pennies. Boy, our Christmas gifts have come a long way from that!</p>
<p>bethievt, my Mom and I also shared a love for these books. My stepmom and I are close and she didn’t read these books, but instead loved the Betsy-Tacy-Tibb books, which I also read and enjoyed. But the Little House books will probably always be my favorites.</p>
<p>Yes, I find it so odd that Laura went 22 years without visiting her Ma, whom she portrayed with so much love and respect in her books! I wonder what the deal was.</p>
<p>My third grade teacher read chapters out loud to us daily also. Think she started with Little House on the Prairie rather than Big Woods. I especially remember The Long Winter. She definitely made a reader out of me. Never got my kids interested in them though I tried. Guess Harry Potter was more their speed!</p>
<p>My oldest read all of them, even the ones written by her daughter. This was 1st/2nd grade which was about as long as her pioneer phase. Her school also studied the Oregon trail in 1st gd, complete with a biography, & a journal of the journey. The class ( actually it was k-2) had also made wagons and every day they discussed the trials & tribulations of the trail.
This year their end of the year trip was to Pioneer Farms where they got to sleep in a barn and pat Bacon Bits, the pig. My D was in absolute heaven.
:)</p>
<p>The next year , they arrived in Seattle and renacted the great Seattle fire & the rebuilding. Pretty interesting stuff.</p>
<p>(& she now has a large fluffy black dog named Jack, but as he was her BFs dog before she met him, that may just be coincidence. )</p>
Maybe she was ticked off because Caroline made Laura give up her doll when another little girl admired it. I swear, I never got over that scene.</p>
<p>I read all 8 books, PLUS Farmer Boy, aloud to three different daughters. By the last go-round, I was so glad to get to Farmer Boy I can’t tell you, because Almanzo’s upbringing wasn’t as poverty-stricken. I did find all the detail on how the houses were built and the clothing made, etc., fascinating.</p>
<p>emerald, my kids had a pioneer phase that seemed to go on forever. They would fashion a covered wagon out of a small table and chair set, then pile their every belonging into it.</p>
<p>^^^^^The pioneer days were actually quite fascinating, and if you think about it, you’d have to be either really brave, really “positive” in your approach to life, or perhaps really reckless to venture forth out of the “civilized” areas to make your way through the country during those times.</p>
<p>Pa and Laura were two of a kind in the books, and Mary was practically a clone of Ma, so perhaps there were dynamics going on in real life which resulted in Laura not making the effort to make physical contact with her family after her beloved Pa died.</p>
<p>I remember reading one of the books to my kids on a road trip to South Dakota years ago. We were on our way to Mount Rushmore, but stopped in Desmet for Laura Ingalls Wilder Days.</p>
<p>I had only two hardback books from my childhood. One was Little House in the Big Woods & the other was Misty of Chincotegue.
I cannot overstate how much those books meant to me.</p>
<p>I found it absolutely fascinating to learn that Almanzo’s father lost his fortune when he took the advice of his bossy daughter Eliza Jane and put all his eggs in the stock market, only to live to regret it in one of the stock market crashes. You remember her-the mean school teacher, “Lazy, lousy, Liza Jane” who went head to head with a borderline rebellious Laura in Little Town on the Prairie?</p>
<p>I read them to my kids during one of OUR long winters, when the girls were just toddlers and my S was 5. The girls sat through them, and I don’t think they ever revisited the books. My S fell in love with the series, and re read The Long Winter yearly for a very long time. </p>
<p>My sister and I are both fans, and she has visited some sites, like DeSmet, SD. I’ve read some of the more historic discussion of Laura’s life. One of these days I’ll get to Pepin, WI, as I’ve driven by the freeway exit more than once. </p>
<p>Early exposure to this series may be one of the reasons for my essential discontent with life in the current era. Nothing warms my heart like these books.</p>
<p>Rachel F Seidman apparently was motivated to become a historian by the Ingalls story.
[Common-place:</a> This Little House of Mine](<a href=“common-place-archives.org”>common-place-archives.org)</p>
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