Fairy tales

I suppose I was about eight years old when I was given a great big book of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales for Christmas.  I've fairly certain it was from my sister and her husband.  I wonder if children still read fairy tales these days.   A lot of the tales were downright scary!  Some were sad, some were funny, and some would scare me to death.  I read some of them over and over, and avoided others.  Here I am, 79 years old, remembering the book my sister gave me for Christmas.  

I remember only parts of most of the stories.  I got to thinking about that book this morning when, for some reason, one came to mind about a princess on a glass mountain, one of my favorite stories in the book.  Whoever could ride a horse to the top of the glass mountain would get to marry the princess.

Often I do a google search to find out what the whole story is, because I don't remember the details, and then I realize why I liked it.  You'll find a synopsis of the Glass Mountain HERE, if you're interested.  Now I know why I was so fond of this one:  one of the characters was a young man who sat in the ashes (??) and his brothers made fun of him (sort of like a male Cinderella).  At the end, though, that young man won the princess.  And yes, I liked Cinderella, too.  Those stories made me happy.

Some of those stories scared me.  I read them all, but if they were scary or sad, I didn't read them as often.  The saddest one was The Little Match Girl, which I both liked and hated, all at the same time.  She freezes to death and dies at the end.  I could almost feel the cold winter air, on the few times I found the courage to read it again.  It almost makes me shiver even now.

One of my favorites was about a man who claimed to kill seven with one blow... in the end, he gets a princess.  There must have been lots of princesses in Fairytale Land.  Remember the Princess and the Pea?  Yes, another favorite.  I always liked happy endings.    

I understood those were only made-up stories, but the scary ones still frightened me.  I imagine in this day and age, a lot of parents wouldn't want their children to read something that would scare them to death, but I think the stories were good for me.  I learned that some things that scare me aren't even real; they're just a figment of my imagination. 

I always got a lot of Christmas gifts, but that book, although it must have gotten tossed out by the time I was twelve, is still a part of me.  I remember favorite gifts from other childhood Christmases: a metal barn with fences and farm animals, a certain doll, a wooden snow sled.  But none of those has stayed with me like Hans Christian Andersen's fairytales.  Maybe that's the reason I still like to read so much.