LHOTR - ornament gossip

 It’s no clove apple or needle book, but it’s a homemade ornament for our Little House. 

The COVID crisis has made family gatherings near impossible to plan. And since we all wake up every morning wishing we were Up North, it's time to start thinking about the holidays.

We have long had two trees up in the house, a traditional seven-footer, and a smaller, tabletop tree to supplement my skate ornament addiction. This year, I’m retiring the skate tree and moving the little tree to the little house. 

Good news is, this marks the resurrection of the Little House ornaments for Christmas. Way back when, the Little House gift shop released a yearly ornament for each of the books, using Helen Sewell’s original illustrations, with the promise of 12 in all. 

Any LauraFan can sniff out the trouble with this plan before you can say “Flutterbudget.”

You see, Helen was the illustrator for the first edition of the original eight books, doing them in a woodcut style.

Helen’s depiction of the family getting ready for sugaring off party at grandma’s. 

Garth Williams re-illustrated the books in 1947, producing 64 memorable pencil sketches across the series that has endured for almost 80 years. Garth also illustrated one more book than Helen, since he was asked to do the drawings for The First Four Years, a manuscript published in 1971, years after Laura and daughter Rose’s death. 

Garth Williams pencil illustration of the girls pouring boiled candy into pans of snow. 

So there’s continuity issue number one in the ornament series.  

Continuity issues two and three: On the Way Home and West From Home are a collection of diaries and letters about the family move to Missouri in 1894 and Laura’s trip to visit adult Rose in San Francisco in 1915. However, Garth did not provide drawings for these. I think the combination of finding these papers and the popularity of the TV show back in the 70s meant hastily publishing the titles and rushing the books to market with forgettable drab cover art. 

I became quite the hanger-on in Mansfield when I lived in Saint Louis, road-tripping to the Ozarks on my days off just to ogle Laura's black wedding dress (edgy, my gal).  I got to talking to the ladies who ran the gift shop about the ornament issue. According to one, there was a fight between the families over whose illustrations would be used, and the fight included money and lawyers. 

As a non-profit museum store attempting to stay afloat, they opted to limit the series to the original eight, add a Mansfield homestead ornament, and discontinue the annual tradition. 

Lot of drama and history packed into celebrating nine little ornaments! 

The tree is only 4 feet tall, so not a whole lot of decorations will be needed; besides, we have plenty to outfit two trees with all the spangles you can imagine. And not a lot of presents either: I think the little house was present enough.