Issue 5: Gifts
Hey there!
Thanksgiving is hardly over and Christmas is almost here—remember when the time between the two felt endless? Gifts are on our mind this issue, both literal (all of the books mentioned here would make wonderful presents) and figurative. Alex takes on Tasha Tudor, the author-illustrator whose determination to live life on her own terms makes her a beloved but complicated inspiration, and Claudia writes about the badly-behaved pug helping her make it through the last month of 2020.
Alex on Tasha Tudor
You can think of Tasha Tudor as the grandma of cottagecore. In between illustrating classic children’s books (The Secret Garden, The Wind in the Willows) and creating her own (Pumpkin Moonshine, A Time to Keep), Tudor gardened, spun, wove, cooked on a wood-burning stove, and raised four kids, plus various pets, while dressing in antique gowns and never, ever settling for a store-bought Christmas tree. She mined her old-fashioned lifestyle for inspiration; it’s baked through her best-known books, most of which are light on plot and heavy on seasonal rhythms and holiday traditions, especially Christmas.
Reading these books always half-convinces me that I could also keep up a rural homestead and, say, build a magical Nativity creche in the woods, if I just tried hard enough. Tudor’s stories are charming in the extreme, but they never feel inauthentic, since she never denies the huge amount of work living in an 1830s storybook world demands. For every watercolor of a smiling family around a candlelit Christmas tree, there’s another of the same family dragging their tree home on a sled, or hanging it with ornaments. The finished product isn’t the point. The real joy is in the work of making it.
That’s a joy Tudor apparently shared. In The Private World of Tasha Tudor, a beautiful book full of photos of her hand-built Vermont farmhouse, she admits that she “was tired most of [her] younger life,” but you wouldn’t guess that from her output, and she never questioned whether the exhaustion was worth it—publicly, at least.
I didn’t discover her for myself until college when, thanks to an Internet friend’s blog post, I went down a Tasha Tudor rabbit hole. Her books are all gorgeous and worth reading; so are the books about her, though actual biographies are thin on the ground, especially if you’re looking for anything less than a glowing portrait of the world’s most unique and inspiring artist. Back then, though, I wasn’t looking for less—or more—than that. I didn’t need the dirty laundry, I needed inspiration for how to live my own life. I flip-flopped from major to major, unsure of what I wanted or was capable of; Tasha Tudor had had the drive to live exactly as she wanted to. Her stubbornness and matter-of-fact selfishness about the whole thing astounded me. “I always get my own way,” she says in Private World.
I’m still astounded, though now I know some of the uglier details. When Tudor died (in 2008, at 92), her family couldn’t even agree on where to bury her ashes. Her youngest daughter, Efner, resents growing up with a mother who “absolutely refus[ed]” to deal with real-world problems, and her son Thomas wasn’t wild about living as a 19th century throwback, either: “I remember strongly disliking the solitude and being different from other people.” Her lifestyle wasn’t for everyone, but Tudor never seems to have considered that, or cared.
It makes the gushing biographies harder to take—so what if she lived in a lovely world of imagination, reality isn’t “anything we choose to believe in,” no matter what the syrupy documentary about her Christmas traditions, Take Peace!, says. (Major points for irony, since after Tudor’s death her family spent years feuding over her will.) For all her sweet stories and beautiful books, I wonder if Tudor’s life was a gift to anyone but herself. And I’m less inspired by her selfishness. I wonder if she was lonely, especially as she got older and most of her family drifted away. It’s almost enough to make those sparkling Christmas pictures feel fake.
Almost. Why can’t your life be your own gift to yourself, ugly details and all? At least Tudor’s life was completely her own. This year, my life feels so much smaller and lonelier than it did when I first fell in love with her work. It feels even more out of my own control, too, which is why I can’t help feeling that I need to take a page out of her book. I can’t forget to treat life as less than a gift, or better yet, a project—something to mold as close to my own version of happiness as I can.
And one more thing—Tasha Tudor really did try to make her children’s lives as charming as she’d made hers. Sometimes, they were magical. “[W]e’d go down to the river,” says Thomas, remembering a scene right out of one of my favorite Tudor books, Becky’s Birthday, “and float cakes down on little rafts at nighttime, with candles burning on them.”
(Quotes from Efner Holmes and Thomas Tudor from “Tasha Tudor’s Heirs Squabble Over Will.” The Associated Press, 22 February 2010, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tasha-tudors-heirs-squabble-over-will/)
Claudia on the Pig the Pug Series
I usually try not to play my hand this early in an essay, but the Pig the Pug picture books, written and illustrated by Aaron Blabey, are a gift. I’m not exaggerating when I say that they’re helping me get through the current pandemic and post-election insanity. The series is snarky, colorful, and full of fart jokes. Its formula is also simple: Pig, a bug-eyed lapdog “with a tremendous sense of entitlement” wreaks selfish and hilarious havoc before getting his just deserts. These usually come in the form of some grievous bodily injury, like getting crushed by a bowling ball, dropped from Santa’s sleigh, or attacked by a swarm of piranhas—all told in charmingly rhyming quatrains.
Pig is definitely unpleasant, and as much as anyone can deserve the indignities he’s subjected to, he does. Still, his schemes are gleefully anarchic, and there’s just as much pleasure to be gained from his misbehavior as there is from his over-the-top comeuppances. More than winking snarkiness is going on here: The real joy of the series comes from how it reaffirms and subverts the limits and conventions of didactic children’s literature.
Modern children’s literature’s roots are entrenched in oral folktales, books, and textbooks meant to deliver instructional, and usually cautionary, tales to the young. One of the most enduring of Pig’s ancestors is The New England Primer. Even if the title isn’t familiar, you’ve most likely heard some version of the alphabet the Primer is famous for, beginning with “In Adam’s fall / We sinned all.”
I was very familiar with this alphabet as a young reader, finding reproductions printed in the backs of the historical fiction I devoured. I loved it, but not with the serious, theological devotion my Puritan forebears would have preferred. Its tone, sober to the point of grimness and entrenched in harsh Calvinist theology, read more like a parody to me, with my limited understanding of Puritan culture and society. This alphabet gave me a dose of high-handed moralism that I acknowledged while simultaneously laughing up my sleeve at it.
The Pig series uses this principle of humorous harshness to create a tongue-in-cheek addition to the didactic canon while also crafting a message significantly more comforting than anything in The New England Primer. Pig himself, while not exactly dynamic, is considerably more multi-dimensional than many protagonists in these types of texts. He’s a selfish, ignorant attention hog, but he’s not diabolical. His cruelty comes from his outsize wants, not inborn moral degeneracy. Pig is a stand-in for the worst behaviors of his toddler audience, and while Blabey doesn’t condone his actions, he doesn’t—metaphorically or literally—squash Pig beyond repair, like many earlier examples of didactic literature do.
For example, in Pig the Tourist, Pig learns that rudeness and cultural insensitivity will come back to bite him and is chastised, but only to a point. Pig knows better than to “ruin a whole holiday,” but, according to the narrator,
“The truth I must tell.
Although he might try . . .
Pig does NOT travel well.”
(Accompanied by a picture of Pig letting one rip in his first-class plane seat. It’s pretty great.)
With this conclusion, Blabey assures his readers that it’s okay to get things wrong. They’ll survive. The trying counts, and the awareness of why actions matter and how they affect others. We’ll always slip up, the books suggest, and the best way to deal with these missteps is to learn from and do our best (note the emphasis on “try” in the quote) not to repeat them.
You can argue that these more constructive themes are overshadowed by the series’ snarky tone and the copious focus on Pig’s antics. It’s a fair point, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re present, which is more than I can say for The New England Primer. The two exist on a sort of continuum as far as didactic children’s literature is concerned: one stiff, self-serious, and condemnatory, the other aware of its ridiculousness and gesturing towards forgiveness. In a way, the genre comes full circle with these two examples. First, it told kids they’d be punished. Now, it tells them they can try.
We wish everyone a happy and safe holiday season with their loved ones! Check back in January, when we’ll be tackling dystopias for our first 2021 issue.
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia