Growing up in Casper, I idolized Ma Ingalls in the "Little House on the Prairie" books.
"But we read it all, from the "Little House on the Prairie" books to "Don't Cry, Big Bird".
Lily said she was enjoying reading the first of the "Little House on the Prairie" books, Wilder's autobiographical series based on her pioneering girlhood on the very land where these girls were now playing.
The Little House on the Prairie books might do the job too – imagine striking out for the west, further and further on until there was nothing but grass below and sky above, with nowt to do but build a log cabin and start wrenching a living from the earth.
As a child, I was a big fan of the Little House on the Prairie books and show, and I still have a clear image in my mind of episodes featuring a traveling charlatan, shucking his "cures". Unfortunately, those charlatans still abound, though they now surface in online health forums and pseudo-science articles touting alternative treatments.
The Little House on the Prairie books are so widely known, it's hard to believe that the real-life Laura Ingalls Wilder has been gone for nearly 60 years.
I'd devoured the Little House on the Prairie books as a girl, and my mental image of organic farms resembled the pastoral, prairie-like setting of the books.
I love the Little House on the Prairie books because the girls went outside and had a tea party with rocks, leaves and sticks and they had a grand old time.
Around the same time, the first Christmas tree farm was planted, in Hightstown, N.J., according to "The Wonderful World of Christmas Trees," by Henry H. Albers and Ann Kirk Davis (Mid-Prairie Books, 1997).
