Prairie Girl Quotes

It's like I tell people at my stand-up shows: by making me a bitch, you have given me my freedom, the freedom to say and do things I couldn't do if I was "a nice girl" with some sort of stupid, goody-two-shoes image to keep up. Things that require courage. Things that require balls. Things that need to be done. By making me a bitch, you have freed me from the trite, sexist, bourgeois prison of "likeability." Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.

Part of her wanted to run. Never mind how flowing water was bound to take her to people eventually, all that was likely just a crock of Little House of the Prairie shit.

I used to be a good fighter." She looks out along the boxwoods, wipes off her sweat with her palm. "If you'd known me ten years ago..." She's got no goo on her face, her hair's not sprayed, her nightgown's like an old prairie dress. She takes a deep breath through her nose and I see it. I see the white-trash girl she was ten years ago. She was strong. She didn't take no shit from nobody.

Please, Pa, can I ask just one more question?” “May I,” said Ma. Laura began again. “Pa, please, may I--” “What is it?” Pa asked. It was not polite for little girls to interrupt, but of course Pa could do it.

When I meet a pretty girl and beg her: "Be so good as to come with me," and she walks past without a word, this is what she means to say: "You are no Duke with a famous name, no broad American with Red Indian figure, level, brooding eyes and a skin tempered by the air of the prairies and the rivers that flow through them, you have never journeyed to the seven seas and voyaged on them wherever they may be, I don't know where. So why, pray, should a pretty girl like myself go with you?" "You forget that no automobile swings you through the street in long thrusts; I see no gentlemen escorting you in a close half-circle, pressing on your skirts from behind and murmuring blessings on your head; your breasts are well laced into your bodice, but your thighs and hips make up for that restraint; you are wearing a taffeta dress with a pleated skirt such as delighted all of us last autumn, and yet you smile-inviting mortal danger-from time to time." "Yes, we're both in the right, and to keep us from being irrevocably aware of it, hadn't we better just go our separate ways home?

If being a girl is a frontier all its own, what is the manifest destiny?

I’m Prairie,” the girl said, glancing at Iris. “Like the grass.” “I’m Iris. Like an eyeball.

The cyclone had set the house down gently, very gently – for a cyclone—in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.

This is the first time for the girl, a time of revelation. Mysteries unravel at this height, patterns emerge. She stands woman--tall, shoulder to shoulder, with the sun and laughs to think that such a splendid world had ever frightened her. All that she sees, farm and forest, pasture and prairie, city and country, and continent, stretches before her like tomorrows filled with promise . . . She was born to this kingdom. In time it will be hers to explore, to make her own. One climb is over, another just beginning. She is rich in days, wealthy in possibilities. And here in this crowning moment, For the very first time . . . She knows.

I pretended to be a Cheyenne guide. I pretended to be a prairie woman. I pretended Henry was my old-timey husband taking me to our new homestead. I leaned down and patted Trouble’s neck. “Good boy,” I said. “Trusty steed.

Where did the voice of Alfarata go, Ma?” “Goodness!” Ma said. “Aren’t you asleep yet?” “I’m going to sleep,” Laura said. “But please tell me where the voice of Alfarata went?” “Oh I suppose she went west,” Ma answered. “That’s what the Indians do.” “Why do they do that, Ma?” Laura asked. “Why do they go west?” “They have to,” Ma said. “Why do they have to?” “The government makes them, Laura,” said Pa. “Now go to sleep.” He played the fiddle softly for a while. Then Laura asked, “Please, Pa, can I ask just one more question?” “May I,” said Ma. Laura began again. “Pa, please, may I--” “What is it?” Pa asked. It was not polite for little girls to interrupt, but of course Pa could do it.

All the time, of course, Laura or Mary was minding Baby Carrie, except when she had her afternoon nap. Then they sat and soaked in the sunshine and the wind until Laura forgot that the baby was sleeping. She jumped up and ran and shouted till Ma came to the door and said, “Dear me, Laura, must you yell like an Indian? I declare,” Ma said, “if you girls aren’t getting to look like Indians! Can I never teach you to keep your sunbonnets on?” Pa was up on the house wall beginning the roof. He looked down at them and laughed. “One little Indian, two little Indians, three little Indians,” he sang, softly. “No, only two.” “You make three,” Mary said to him. “You’re brown, too.” “But you aren’t little, Pa,” said Laura.

Wilder wrote, 'The roses scented the wind, and along the road the fresh blossoms, with their new petals and golden centers, looked up like little faces.

I do have a girl that sets the moon and stars.

By 1867, there were only fifty Dakota left in Minnesota.67 That year, a baby girl was born just across the Mississippi, in a little house in the Big Woods.

The little killer who’s been living alone out here on the prairie is gone now, and all that’s left is the broken shell of a girl who has no place to call home and no people to call family.

She informed me that people’s real selves always reveal themselves eventually; that those who are selfish, spoiled, and mean will age sooner and wrinkle earlier than those who are not. She said that if I was good and kind and patient, it would also show in my face; that I would age gracefully, and when I did get old, I would have laugh lines instead of deep furrows from frowning. I would have dismissed this as just a silly story to get young girls to be nice to each other, except that my aunt was in her seventies and looked years younger than all the other stage mothers on the set.

Many of the girls wear simple dresses to church. We do not make a point of ‘dressing up,’ nor do we study one another to see what is being worn. Nor does God. It’s our hearts He views as we enter the doors to His church. Not our clothing.

But as soon as he felt the first blast of ice slap his unprotected face, Gavin thought, once more, of that girl. How many ways could he come up with to describe what happened when young, hopeful—yearning—women were frozen to death out on the prairie? Gavin looked up at the sky, hoping, to his own surprise, to see a break in the clouds, a glimpse of a fading sun. But no such break occurred.

Once, some friends and I were driving back from partying up there, in the middle of winter, on one of those perfectly clear and freezing nights. It was four in the morning and I was nodding in and out of hammered sleep, my vision mashed potatoes, we stopped so I could throw up at least twice. But as we drove with my face smushed on the window I noticed the field of snow along that stretch of the highway, all still and unmucked with. It looked brushed, almost. Or whipped. Designed. The patterns were the kind you'd see up close in a big rock. Sometimes you see that for far distances out here on the prairie, like a long white-blue sea. It's so gorgeous. And even with my brain's skeleton-crew state, I just thought, man. Everyone calls our part of the world bleak. But it's not bleak. I don't think it's bleak.

I found the world of the Little House books to be so much less confusing, not just because it was "simpler," as plenty of people love to insist, but because it reconciled all the little contradictions of my modern girlhood. On the Banks of Plum Creek clicked with me especially, with its perfect combination of pinafores and recklessness. (I will direct your attention to the illustration on page 31 of my Plum Creek paperback, where you will note how fabulous Laura looks as she pokes the badger with a stick; her style is casual yet feminine, perfect for precarious nature adventures!) At an age when I found myself wanting both a Webelos uniform and a head of beautiful Superstar Barbie hair, On the Banks of Plum Creek was a reassuring book. Being a girl sometimes made more sense in Laura World than it did in real life.

Ma untied the handkerchief and exclaimed at what she found. The beads were even prettier than they had been in the Indian camp. Laura stirred her beads with her finger and watched them sparkle and shine. “These are mine,” she said. Then Mary said, “Carrie can have mine.” Ma waited to hear what Laura would say. Laura didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to keep those pretty beads. Her chest felt all hot inside, and she wished with all her might that Mary wouldn’t always be such a good little girl. But she couldn’t let Mary be better than she was. So she said, slowly, “Carrie can have mine, too.” “That’s my unselfish, good little girls,” said Ma. She poured Mary’s beads into Mary’s hands, and Laura’s into Laura’s hands, and she said she would give them a thread to string them on. The beads would make a pretty necklace for Carrie to wear around her neck. Mary and Laura sat side by side on their bed, and they strung those pretty beads on the thread that Ma gave them. Each wet her end of the thread in her mouth and twisted it tightly. Then Mary put her end of the thread through the small hole in each of the beads, and Laura put her end through her beads, one by one. They didn’t say anything. Perhaps Mary felt sweet and good inside, but Laura didn’t. When she looked at Mary she wanted to slap her. So she dared not look at Mary again.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate. When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again. That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

I couldn't ever forget the Big Muddy,' Rose said. Mama said she probably wouldn't either. 'But small, everyday things are easy to forget,' she said. 'You will want to remember those things. Life will be changed when you are grown, just the way life has changed since I was a little girl. The wild prairie is tamed now. Big cities are lit by electrified lamps. People can even visit each other from miles apart, simply by talking into a box. The only way to measure our progress is to read about what this country used to be.

Ambition is, like other good things[.] a good only when use in moderation. It has worked great good for the world, and great evil also. [Ale]xander is an example of a man completely carried away by ambition: so much so that when he had conquered the whole world (which one would suppose was enough to satisfy ambition); he wept because there were no more world to conquer. Ambition is a good servant, but a hard master; and if you think it is likely to become your master: I would say to you in the words of the immortals Shakespeare: 'Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels.

Would a panther carry off a little girl, Pa?” “Yes,” said Pa. “And kill her and eat her, too. You and Mary must stay in the house till I shoot that panther. As soon as daylight comes I will take my gun and go after him.” All the next day Pa hunted that panther. And he hunted the next day and the next day. He found the panther’s tracks, and he found the hide and bones of an antelope that the panther had eaten, but he did not find the panther anywhere. The panther went swiftly through tree-tops, where it left no tracks. Pa said he would not stop till he killed that panther. He said, “We can’t have panthers running around in a country where there are little girls.” But he did not kill that panther, and he did stop hunting it. One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other’s words. But the Indian pointed to the panther’s tracks, and he made motions with his gun to show Pa that he had killed that panther. He pointed to the tree-tops and to the ground, to show that he had shot it out of a tree. And he motioned to the sky, and west and east, to say that he had killed it the day before. So that was all right. The panther was dead. Laura asked if a panther would carry off a little papoose and kill and eat her, too, and Pa said yes. Probably that was why the Indian had killed that panther.

My husband, Eric, has a joke he likes to say: “Ask Jessica to sing about Jesus or America, and she’ll be there. Super Bowl, backyard cookout, whatever you got, she’s coming to sing ‘God Bless America.’ ” And he’s right. Growing up in Texas, I sang that song over and over. From Memorial Day parades to Veteran’s Day pancake breakfasts—I was your girl. When I sang it at the East Room of the White House, I finally found out I had been flubbing the lyrics all those years. I was there to kick off the USO holiday tour for troops fighting in Afghanistan. It was the first time they let celebrities in after 9/11, because, well, they were busy. It was surreal to hear President Bush speak, thanking the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his service, the transportation secretary for keeping the airlines safe. And then he added, “I want to thank Rob Schneider and Jessica Simpson as well.” They asked me to sing “God Bless America,” and I gave it my all. President Bush was in the front row, right next to Laura, and I watched him quietly sing along, his mouth moving along with mine. Something went wrong after we got to the mountains, though. I said, “to the rivers,” just like I always did, and, well, he knew it was “the prairies.” I was so embarrassed that I apologized to him and Mrs. Bush after. “I swear all this time I thought it was rivers!” I said. “That’s okay, Jessica,” he said. “God blessed the rivers, too.

One pioneer remembered seeing “an open bleak prairie, the cold wind howling overhead…a new-made grave, a woman and three children sitting near by, a girl of 14 summers walking round and round in a circle, wringing her hands and calling upon her dead parent.” Janette Riker was only a young girl when she headed for Oregon with her father and two brothers in 1849. Late in September they camped in a valley in Montana, and the men went out to hunt. They never returned. While she waited, Janette built a small shelter, moved the wagon stove in with all the provisions and blankets, and hunkered down. She killed the fattest ox from her family’s herd, salted down the meat, and lived alone through the winter, amid howling wolves and mountain lions. She was discovered in April by Indians who were so impressed by her story that they took her to a fort in Washington. She never found out what happened to her family.

build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar--except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke. It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly. Today, however, they were not playing. Uncle Henry sat upon the doorstep and looked anxiously at the sky, which was even grayer than usual. Dorothy stood in the door with Toto in her arms, and looked at the sky too. Aunt Em was washing the

She told everything as quickly as she could, stringing sentences together the way she had when she was a little girl. By the end of the tale,she found herself defending her mother,angry at the world that made it necessary for her to explain.Impulsively, she grabbed a curry comb and began to brush Red Star's coat vigorously.She brushed for a long time,and tears began to blur her vision.She tried to resign herself to what seemed to be happening.Then a hand covered hers and squeezed affectionately. Mac took the curry comb away,and bent to kiss the back of her hand. "So,Miss King,will you do me the honor of accompanying me to the social next Friday evening at the Congregational Church?" Miss King embarrassed herself by saying yes! so loudly that the dozing horse in the stall next to Red Star jumped and kicked the side of his stall in fright.The two young people laughed, and MacKenzie lifted LisBeth into the air and swung her around in his arms. Sick with apprehension,Jesse had been unable to remain alone for long.She returned to the kitchen to help Augustus with meal preparations, praying earnestly for LisBeth and MacKenzie while she worked.When the two young people burst through the kitchen door together,their happy smiles told the older women all they needed to know. LisBeth was sobered when she saw her Mother. "Mother,I..." Jesse held up a hand to stop her. "It's all right,LisBeth. I'm glad everything turned out.I've been praying for you both." "Mother,all four of us know about Papa. Would you tell me a story about him while we make supper?" The culprit never came forward, but at some time that evening, the first book-burning in the State of Nebraska took place. Francis Day's Memoirs of the Savage West found its way into Augusta's cook stove.

Girls matter. As do boys, whether big or little. Every person matters. Do you know why?" They shook their heads in unison. "We are all created in God's image. He crafted male and female, and He breathed His very own breath of life into them. He loves His creation. What God sees as valuable and important is valuable and important.

Maggie and I were delighted. It was now Jett's turn to go to the dark side. "I've never seen such a bunch of doom cookies," she said, wiping down the tables. "What?" "Doom cookies. You know, people who pretend to be something they're not, like girls in my class who pretend to be bad-ass but go home and read The Little House on the Prairie in their Disney princess bedrooms." "Who were the Pie Night people pretending to be? I don't quite follow." "They're pretending to be bad-ass pie bakers," Jett trilled in a church-lady falsetto, " 'Oh, leaf lard is the best.' 'No, I swear by a mixture of Crisco and butter.' When was the last time they actually baked a pie? If they did, they wouldn't be gorging themselves here on Pie Night. They probably don't even own a rolling pin." Jett sniffed. And then she added, diplomatically, "But your pie was good.

At Hobby Lobby She tosses a bolt of fabric into the air. Hill country, prairie, a horse trots there. I say three yards, and her eyes say more: What you need is guidance, a hand that can zip a scissor through cloth. What you need is a picture of what you've lost. To double the width against the window for the gathering, consider where you sit in the morning. Transparency's appealing, except it blinds us before day's begun. How I long to captain that table, to return in a beautiful accent a customer's request. My mother kneeled down against her client and cut threads from buttons with her teeth, inquiring with a finger in the band if it cut into the waist. Or pulled a hem down to a calf to cool a husband's collar. I can see this in my sleep and among notions. My bed was inches from the sewing machine, a dress on the chair forever weeping its luminescent frays. Sleep was the sound of insinuation, a zigzag to keep holes receptive. Or awakened by a backstitch balling under the foot. A needle cracking? Blood on a white suit? When my baby's asleep I write to no one and cannot expect a response. The fit's poor, always. No one wears it out the door. But fashions continue to fly out of magazines like girls out of windows. Sure, they are my sisters. Their machines, my own. The office from which I wave to them in their descent has uneven curtains, made with my own pink and fragile hands.

Grit and avoidance had served Midwesterners for centuries. In Wisconsin, winters lasted up to nine months. Night fell early and lasted well into the next day. Living in darkness could trigger mental illnesses; in the 1800s, newspapers printed stories about settlers walking naked into the snow or massacring their families in the middle of a hailstorm. Giant wolves prowled the prairie land. Those who survived with minds intact developed a high emotional threshold for isolation and bone-chilling cold. They learned to cope with the elements by repressing their feelings.

When we reach the fence, we see the Dauntless standing in our headlight beams, blocking the gate. Their blue armbands stand out against the rest of their clothing. I try to keep my expression pleasant. I will not be able to fool them into thinking I’m Amity with a scowl on my face. A dark-skinned man with a gun in hand approaches Marcus’s window. He shines a flashlight at Marcus first, then Christina, then me. I squint into the beam, and force a smile at the man like I don’t mind bright lights in the eyes and guns pointed at my head in the slightest. The Amity must be deranged if this is how they really think. Or they’ve been eating too much of that bread. “So tell me,” the man says. “What’s an Abnegation member doing in a truck with two Amity?” “These two girls volunteered to bring provisions to the city,” Marcus says, “and I volunteered to escort them so that they would be safe.” “Also, we don’t know how to drive,” says Christina, grinning. “My dad tried to teach me years ago but I kept confusing the gas pedal for the brake pedal, and you can imagine what a disaster that was! Anyway, it was really nice of Joshua to volunteer to take us, because it would have taken us forever otherwise, and the boxes were so heavy--” The Dauntless man holds up his hand. “Okay, I get it.” “Oh, of course. Sorry.” Christina giggles. “I just thought I would explain, because you seemed so confused, and no wonder, because how many times do you encounter this--””Right,” the man says. “And do you intend to return to the city?” “Not anytime soon,” Marcus says. “All right. Go ahead, then.” He nodes to the other Dauntless by the gate. One of them types a series of numbers on the keypad, and the gate slides open to admit us. Marcus nods to the guard who let us through and drives over the worn path to Amity headquarters. The truck’s headlights catch tire tracks and prairie grass and insects weaving back and forth. In the darkness to my right I see fireflies lighting up to a rhythm that is like a heartbeat. After a few seconds, Marcus glances at Christina. “What on earth was that?” “There’s nothing the Dauntless hate more than cheerful Amity babble,” says Christina, lifting a shoulder. “I figured if he got annoyed it would distract him and he would let us through.” I smile with all my teeth. “You are a genius.” “I know.” She tosses her head like she’s throwing her hair over one shoulder, only she doesn’t have enough to throw. “Except,” says Marcus. “Joshua is not an Abnegation name.” “Whatever. As if anyone knows the difference.

been passed around, for every one wanted to see if

It felt like her body made the decision for her, and the prospect of being able to shut down the fears quickly taking over had been more temptation than Lara was able to resist. She relaxed her legs and felt a fresh rush of moisture coat her slick sex as Fischer pressed his lips against her ear and cooed sweet words of approval. “Such a good girl,

Who Was Laura Ingalls Wilder? In 1874, two horses slowly pulled a covered wagon across the open prairie. The man with the reins, Charles Ingalls, had twinkly blue eyes and a long curly beard. Inside the wagon were his wife and daughters, plus everything the family owned. A seven-year-old girl named Laura gazed out the back of the wagon. She saw an enormous green prairie stretching to the skyline. Not a tree was in sight. How different this was from the woodland home she had left behind in Wisconsin. The Ingallses were traveling west. They didn’t know exactly where they would end up. This wasn’t the first time they had moved to a new home by covered wagon. And it wouldn’t be the last. They were part of a huge wave of pioneers pouring out of the East to settle the vast stretches of untamed land in the middle of America.

She’s pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes.

I fidget through class, barely paying attention to Mrs. Schumaker droning on about wagon trains and buffalo. I get it. Life on the prairie was tough. Churning your own butter? Yay for the Industrial Revolution.

Another woman writer who, like Edith Durham, fell in love with this part of Albania, was the American, Rose Wilder Lane, at that time the highest-paid woman writer in the USA. Her mother was Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose even better-known books of the Little House on the Prairie series were much loved by generations of little girls.

But this is the country I know. This Valley. This river. This flat land that goes on forever. The dang wind chill every winter. The wind blowing across this prairie we bend over and walk into. We get used to it. It becomes us. You know, when they sing, 'amber waves of grain,' that tugs at my heart. Still. Those are our wheat fields ... -Sheriff Wheaton

She stood up, went to the window by the door, stared mournfully out at the day. The rain had stopped. the sun had come out, burning heat through the trees, sucking the moisture right back up into the brilliant blue prairie sky, She saw the way this fierce naked light hit the empty street. She saw the sky with its thin line of evaporating clouds and tried to think about herself in the future. But no image would come. ... Nothing. The emptiness of it all filled her with dread.

grief becomes a body of water asks where are your cloves of garlic? your sliced bird's eye chili? the body of water wants to be named is only a girl

curious to know that cockerels—aka little boy chickens—develop pointy feathers around their neck and tail, while the feathers on a hen—the girls—are rounder. A rooster will also often have a brighter-colored comb and wattle.

I still am amazed at how it all came together. A lanky naïve Mennonite farm boy from the prairies of Canada falling in love with a world wise, beautiful southern girl from Central Florida sounds like a fairy tale! I remember the first time I laid eyes on her… there was just no way in the world that someone as beautiful as her would even notice me. Little did I know that she was having the same thoughts about me. For the life of me I had no idea what she saw in me and still don’t. I count my blessings daily and live in fear that I will be unmasked!

Their school was taught by William Masters’s brother, Samuel Masters, whom the children called “Uncle Sam.” He was a tall, thin, bald man with bad breath and a worrying habit of fondling girls’ hands. Laura protected herself by concealing a pin in her fingers and stabbing him with it. After that, she said, he left her alone.

(Verse 1) Well, Santa traded in his sleigh for a horse named Jingle Bell, Riding through the prairie, spreading cheer and tales to tell. With a lasso made of tinsel and a hat of red and white, He’s the jolliest cowboy, bringing joy on Christmas night. (Chorus) Yeehaw, Santa’s a cowboy, riding under the stars so bright, Delivering gifts and laughter, on this magical night. With his boots and spurs a-jingling, and a heart so full of cheer, Santa the cowboy’s coming, spreading joy to far and near. (Verse 2) He’s got a sack of presents, slung across his saddle horn, With candy canes and toys, for every girl and boy. From the deserts to the mountains, through the snow and rain, Santa the cowboy’s riding, on his merry Christmas train. (Chorus) Yeehaw, Santa’s a cowboy, riding under the stars so bright, Delivering gifts and laughter, on this magical night. With his boots and spurs a-jingling, and a heart so full of cheer, Santa the cowboy’s coming, spreading joy to far and near. (Bridge) Around the campfire, he tells stories of the North Pole, Of reindeer and elves, and a sleigh that’s mighty old. But now he’s a cowboy, with a spirit wild and free, Bringing Christmas to the range, for all the world to see. (Chorus) Yeehaw, Santa’s a cowboy, riding under the stars so bright, Delivering gifts and laughter, on this magical night. With his boots and spurs a-jingling, and a heart so full of cheer, Santa the cowboy’s coming, spreading joy to far and near. (Outro) So hang your stockings by the fire, and listen for his call, Santa the cowboy’s riding, Merry Christmas to all!