White Christmas and Love Actually

I’ve been on a Christmas movie binge: first White Christmas, lovelier than ever. Betty and Bob are still ridiculous - really, Betty, if you just told someone your suspicions about Bob’s evil schemes, it could have all been cleared up in a heartbeat! Also, if Bob really was an evil schemer, I’m sure Judy would have been more than happy to help you foil him.

Judy = my favorite. I love how she’s so winsomely scheming: she does have an angle, as Bob says, but the movie never punishes her for it. She and Phil are an excellent match (their dance on the deck behind the Flamingo is probably my favorite scene in the movie): who knows what messes they’ll get the four of them into next?

Then I watched Love Actually last night, which did not hold up nearly as well. I’d forgotten (if indeed I noticed the first time I saw it) by being really gratuitously fatphobic all over the place. It’s not just background radiation, it’s positively a theme, so pervasive that it rather spoiled the movie for me.

Aurelia’s sister is a joke because she’s fat; Billy Mack makes fat jokes about his manager constantly, and remarks with horror that it turns out that the person he loves most in the world is a “chubby employee”; and there’s a constant drumbeat about how Natalie, the prime minister’s eventual paramour, is plump.

Natalie is apparently the movie’s attempt to tell us that “Fat people can be loved, too!” I submit that this would be far more heart-warming were Natalie actually overweight, rather than a buxom and well-proportioned young woman.

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In other news, would anyone like to beta read my Yuletide fic, a fractured fairy-talish thing in a fandom with which you are likely unfamiliar? *puppy dog eyes* I don't quite have a draft yet, but I'm hoping to change that tomorrow.

Meet Kirsten

I realize this is both on the wrong day and out of order, but...it’s Saint Lucia Day! How could I not post about Kirsten Larson, American Girl's Swedish-American immigrant girl? The scene where she wears a candle-studded crown of wintergreen is emblazoned on my brain!

Seriously. I wanted to wear such a crown so much after I saw that picture.

Kirsten is the girliest of the American Girls. Unlike Felicity, she never complains about doing women’s work or yearns to do boy things. She’s perfectly happy to spend her school recesses sitting in the sun, sewing a quilt with her friends; and the first thing she notices on arriving in America were the women’s pretty ruffled dresses. Her favorite color is even pink!

I feel constrained to add that pink didn’t become a “girl” color till the 1910s - before then, forceful pink was considered suitable for boys, while cool, tranquil blue was for girls. Possibly Kirsten has a secret rebel heart? Maybe nineteenth-century Swedish immigrants just don’t care about girl and boy colors?

But of course the book was written for American girls in the late 20th century, so I think Kirsten’s favorite color is meant to show that Kirsten has the heart of a girly-girl - and that being a girly-girl is perfectly compatible with being brave, kind, and adventurous, the American Girl trifecta of virtues.

Aside from the Saint Lucia crown, I had forgotten almost everything about these books. I recalled Kirsten's secret friend Singing Bird, whose tribe leaves Minnesota because there's nothing to hunt now that the settlers are shooting all the game.

It's a very bloodless displacement, which is perhaps problematic. But then again, I don't think "And then the US Army swooped in and shot all the natives and Kirsten found Singing Bird's bullet-riddled corpse in the snow!" would have been an appropriate scene in a book for eight-year-olds.

I argued in my paper (because in a paper one must make a stand) that the important thing about this story line is the emotional valence. Kirsten doesn't know all the nasty backstory to US government-Indian relations, but she knows that losing her friend is sad, so young readers will be primed to know that it's sad that settlers pushed Indians off their land. I'm waffling about whether this holds water.

Dealing with the really ugly parts of history is, I think, a difficult part of writing historical fiction for children. This is especially true for something like, well, Indian-settler relations, because there's a strong contingent of people who adamantly don't want to believe that white settlers did anything wrong.

But I'm thinking also of for instance children's books about the Holocaust. After Number the Stars I read tons of these books, and I daresay the authors wrote them with the highest of raising-Holocaust-awareness intentions, and my eight-to-ten-year-old awareness was indeed raised, in a "The Holocaust is a great setting for running-away-from-the-Nazis adventure yarns" kind of way. I loathed Donna Jo Napoli's Stones in Water because it's too gritty to be read that way.

I'm wondering if trying to teach children the ugly parts of history through historical fiction isn't like trying to teach them about Death by giving them books like Old Yeller or Bridge to Terabithia. Some will doubtless be receptive; but lots of people have stories about their ferocious youthful rejection of Old Yeller and its ilk, and I suspect gritty!historical!tragedy would strike lots of kids the same way.

But! Getting back to Kirsten! And on a happier note! Let's talk about my very favorite character from the Kirsten series, the only one I remembered aside from Kirsten and Singing Bird! (And poor benighted Marta, of course.)

Miss Winston! Kirsten’s stern but awesome schoolteacher from Maine. Miss Winston's father sails ships; and apparently that wanderlust is heritable, because Miss Winston became a teacher because she “wanted to travel, to meet people, to have adventures!” How cool is that?

The girls scheme with her to pull off their Saint Lucia Day celebration. No wonder she was my favorite.

I remembered there being a great deal more Miss Winston backstory than in fact there is in the books. This often happens with books I read as a child (or had read to me, in the case of Kirsten).