Super Punch's Fairy Tale Contest Finale

Super Punch's SciFi Fairy Tales contest for December has ended. You can see all the entries at The Winner is... I would have chosen the same winning entry--Cormac McEvoy's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves--although there are some great entries. Click through to see them all, especially The Little Marmaid.

And this one would be my honorable mention just for making me laugh...I can just hear McCoy saying, "She's dead, Jim."

Little Red Riding Hood Messenger Bags

Had to share these for a light-hearted Saturday post.

These are available by a creative Etsy seller, KittyEmpire3. I prefer the green one myself, but I love that these are so very much fairy tale oriented and yet somehow understated, too.

In other words, they aren't overly darling and also useful. I love bags and messenger bags are just wonderful for carrying books and papers (or Kindles).


The rest of the items in her shop are not fairy tale oriented, unless you include her Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz messenger bags.

Anyway, I just had to share because I was tickled by these.

(Disclosure: I am not affiliated with this seller. I just liked her stuff and wanted to share.)

Japanese Fairy Tale Stationary

My adventures in San Francisco's Japantown also included a little stationary shop where I found these pencil boxes and a stationary set.


The front of the stationary set with the sticker sheet. Appears that Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and the Three Little Pigs are popular enough to make it into stationary.


The back with images of the papers. Note that Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz are included here.

New Year Folklore

I almost forgot this! Sat down real quick to finish this post before heading off to New Year's celebrations...

New Year's Folklore from Farmer's Almanac

• One of the more popular beliefs is that kissing your beloved at the stroke of midnight ensures twelve months of continuing affection. Failing to do so is said to produce the opposite effect.

• Never begin the New Year with unpaid debts.

• Empty cupboards at the turn of the year foretell a year of poverty.

• The first person to enter your home after midnight foretells the kind of luck you'll have in the coming year. A tall, dark, handsome male bearing small gifts is said to bring the best luck. According to this same tradition, no one should leave the house until someone first enters from outside, and nothing should be removed from the house on New Year's Day.

• Opening all doors and windows at midnight lets the old year escape.

• Babies born on New Year's Day are said to have the best luck throughout their lives.

• A Polish tradition states that if you wake up early on New Year’s Day, you will wake up early for the rest of the year. And if you touch the floor with the right foot when getting up from bed, you could expect a lot of good luck for whole new year

The article also includes several food related folklore for the new year, including:

In the Southern U.S., it is believed that eating black-eyed peas, ham hocks, and collard greens or cabbage on New Year's Day will attract a financial windfall.

I've never followed that tradition, being first generation Southern, but I'm thinking of trying it out tomorrow. I'm rather in the mood for some good southern fare after all the holiday feasting.

New Year folklore from Wilson's Blogmanac:

Got new clothes on?

Many Londoners believe that on New Year's Day it is unlucky not to wear new clothes. Haitians also go out in new clothes, or at least in their very best, as an omen of how their year will go.

And this one makes me laugh since we are eating lasagna tonight. Too late now, perhaps we'll just skip the leftovers tomorrow...

Crappy noodles

A century ago the Sicilians on New Year’s Day ate lascagne cacate, or “crappy noodles”, a kind of lasagne. To eat any other sort of pasta today was considered bad luck. Their saying went “Whoever eats macaroni today will have a bad year”.

Lots of different information here at New Year Traditions And Lore by Phyllis Doyle Burns:

New Year's Day is one of the oldest holidays known to recorded history. The first known observance of this day was in ancient Babylon over 4000 years ago. It was, at that time, celebrated in March - signifying spring as the new beginning.

Until 46 BC, the Romans also celebrated New Year's in March. In that year Julius Caesar designated New Year's Day as January 1st to make sure the days were back in touch with the changes that the sun went through. After many changes of the Roman calendar, the days were so out of sync with the sun that order had to be restored, thus the January 1st date remained the first day of the New Year on the Roman calendar. The tradition was picked up and continued by Egyptian and Celtic cultures.

The tradition of making resolutions on New Year's Eve began with the ancient Babylonians. This, they felt was an excellent way to begin the New Year with a clear conscious, by returning items borrowed from each other. How the resolution making got from that to "I will lose weight," is anyone's guess - yet, over many centuries, this tradition has remained an important part of the celebration. The most modern version of this tradition seems to be to make resolutions that you can break!

And just to show that nothing is really new:

J.C. Leyendecker's December 28, 1907 cover of The Saturday Evening Post depicted a stork and Baby New Year. The myth associated with him is that he is a baby at the beginning of his year, but Baby New Year quickly grows up until he is an elderly bearded man like Father Time at the end of his year. At this point, he hands over his duties to the next Baby New Year. This custom of using a Baby to represent the New year began in Greece in 600 BC and is now a popular traditon with many countries.

Blue Moon Folklore

As you may have already read in the news, tonight's moon is a blue moon. Since it is an unusual event for the final night of the calendar year, I thought I would share some articles and folklore about blue moons.

New Year's Blue Moon: Grab Your Telescope and Vinyls by Heather Horn

Teddy Patridge at Firedoglake explains that a Blue Moon is "the second full moon in a calendar month," although it used to refer to "when a fourth full moon appeared in any season." This next one will be "the first time in 19 years [that] the Blue Moon will appear on December 31st, New Year's Eve." Diving into the particulars of Blue Moon definitions and folklore (the moon won't actually be blue), he adds: "One way to enjoy two successive Blue Moons very quickly, of course, would be to travel to Asia or Australia or New Zealand, as they have two full moons in January 2010, not December 2009."

Folklore of the "Blue Moon" by Philip Hiscock

Meaning is a slippery substance. The phrase "blue moon" has been around a long time, well over 400 years, but during that time its meaning has shifted. I have counted six different meanings which have been carried by the term, and at least four of them are still current today. That makes discussion of the term a little complicated.

The earliest references to a blue moon are in a phrase remarkably like early references to the moon's "green cheese." Both phrases were used as examples of obvious absurdities about which there could be no argument. Four hundred years ago, if someone said, "He would argue the moon was blue," the average sixteenth century man would take it the way we understand, "He'd argue that black is white." This understanding of a blue moon being absurd (the first meaning) led eventually to a second meaning, that of "never." To say that something would happen when the moon turned blue was like saying that it would happen on Tib's Eve (at least before Tib got a day near Christmas assigned to her). Or that it would be on the Twelfth of Never.

But of course we all know there are examples of the moon actually turning blue; that's the third meaning--the moon visually appearing blue. When the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa exploded in 1883, its dust turned sunsets green and the moon blue all around the world for the best part of two years. In 1927 a late monsoon in India set up conditions for a blue moon. And the moon here in Newfoundland was turned blue in 1951 when huge forest fires in Alberta threw smoke particles up into the sky. Even by the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that although visually blue moons were rare, they did happen from time to time. So the phrase "once in a blue moon" came about. It meant then exactly what it means today--that an event was fairly infrequent, but not quite regular enough to pinpoint. That's meaning number four, and today it is still the main one.

From InfoPlease:

"Blue moon" appears to have been a colloquial expression long before it developed its calendrical senses. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reference to a blue moon comes from a proverb recorded in 1528:

If they say the moon is blue,
We must believe that it is true.

Saying the moon was blue was equivalent to saying the moon was made of green (or cream) cheese; it indicated an obvious absurdity. In the 19th century, the phrase until a blue moon developed, meaning "never." The phrase, once in a blue moon today has come to mean "every now and then" or "rarely"—whether it gained that meaning through association with the lunar event remains uncertain.

And of course, Wikipedia has a somewhat informative article about Blue Moons, too.

And final question: What earworm starts in your ear when you hear the phrase "Blue Moon?" And which version? I'm tied between The Marcels and Ella Fitzgerald and The Mavericks. They keep alternating in my head because I love them all although I know some of you perhaps prefer Frank Sinatra.

Robin Hood Trailer (and some Great Big Sea)

While I'm sharing movie trailers today, I'll add in the somewhat disappointing one for Robin Hood. Loving most things fairy tale and folklore, Robin Hood has long been one of my favorite legends.

I'm not saying the film will be disappointing, just that this first trailer pushes none of my buttons, assuring me that I'm not in the primary target audience. Of course, it has almost no dialogue and is mostly full of gritty, violent imagery, rather a thrown together effort. So I'll reserve judgment, just admit to some trepidation. And I am admittedly a character-driven person when it comes to my entertainment choices.

Then again, I can't imagine anything much worse than Kevin Costner's version or the final third season of the recent BBC series starring Jonas Armstrong and Richard Armitage. We enjoyed the first two seasons as reasonable campy fun, but this last season was brutally bad, watched more in fast forward when we bothered to watch it at all. Killing off Maid Marian was a bad mistake among many others...not even adding an interesting Father Tuck helped.



I admit I am most excited about the movie for a reason shared by few. Alan Doyle from Great Big Sea plays Allan A'Dayle in the film. Granted, it's a smaller role, but I'm an unabashed fan and that's enough to woo my interest in the movie, too. Great Big Sea is the one band guaranteed to improve my spirits, make me happy and cause me to bruise my hands from clapping when I see them live. Yes, my left hand was a big purple bruise for days after the last time I saw them.

And in looking up their stuff, I noticed that several of their songs are currently available for free download as MP3s on Amazon. Not sure how long the deals will last, but one really can't argue with free. See:

When I'm Up (I Can't Get Down)

Excursion Around The Bay

Mari Mac (Live)

Feel It Turn (Live)

I love all their work, but one of their most popular is The Hard and the Easy which is all interpretations of older music, not their usual mix of old and new compositions that appear on their other albums. It is one of my favorites although I can't pick a favorite Great Big Sea album for myself.

I foresee a Robin Hood Week on this blog sometime near the release date of the movie.

Shrek Forever After Trailer

I'm a week behind on this apparently, but the first long trailer for Shrek Forever After due out in May 2010 is now available for viewing. I've embedded it below.

This trailer is more appealing to me personally than any of the ones I saw for the third installment. Hopefully it will also be better than that one! Supposedly this will be the last Shrek movie although a Puss in Boots spin-off is still on the docket.