My New Favorite Fairytale

After finishing the good books sent at Christmas from my brother's family, and Robin Hood, I've moved on to reading fairy tales to the children at bedtime. On Easter, my mom presented me with a book that belonged to my grandmother. It's a Reader's Digest collection titled "The World's Best Fairy Tales" and it's quite good. The boys are eating these stories up, "Read another one, Mommy." It even has some decent illustrations. On Thursday and Friday I read the Hans Christian Anderson story called "The Snow Queen*" for the very first time and it is now my favorite fairy tale. Here is my summary.
It begins with an evil mirror breaking, the shards of which fall and corrupt those they pierce. A boy named Kay gets a splinter of this mirror in his eye causing him to see everything that is beautiful as ugly and also one in his heart which begins to turn it to ice. He then meets up with the Snow Queen and she chills him even further with her wicked kisses. But Kay has a faithful and loving friend, Gerda, who goes looking for him and has many adventures along the way winning people to help her on her journey for she is true and loyal to her friend. Eventually she finds him and he is nearly frozen in the Queen's icy castle, where he is trying to spell the word "love" to free himself but he can't remember how. Gerda rushes to him crying, her tears melt his frozen heart and as he too, begins to cry at the sight of his dear friend, his tears wash away the splinter in his eye. He then remembers how to spell "love" freeing him from the Queen's power. After a long journey home, hand in hand, they discover they have grown up and it is summer.

Also we watched Disney's "Enchanted" last weekend, and since we are becoming well versed in fairy tales, it was even more fun. The children were identifying which parts belonged to the different stories, and since parts of the movie are in cartoon, Little Miss was also pleased with the choice.


*The version that I have linked is slightly different than the one in my book, but only in little details.