Pioneer Day 2009

Happy Pioneer Day!

This year our ward had a picnic at Lake Fairfax, and I was asked to be a storyteller for the children. I studied a bunch of old articles and stories, and came up with quite a few fun tales to tell. My goal was to tell stories the children would enjoy-- a little interesting or exciting but not too scary or sad. Tricky, since pioneer tales are often about loss and deprivation. But I managed to find some good things. Children were always children, it seems, no matter the circumstances in which they lived.

One of my favorite things was learning how they played. One account told how they would collect stones and make them into a little corral on the ground, and then they'd put bugs in it and pretend they were cattle. Can't you just see kids using their imaginations like that with whatever they had?



My two puppets, Jack and Jill, were renamed "Tommy" and "Betsy" for the evening, and had matching pioneer outfits. They also had a wiggly baby brother (a smaller hand puppet). The old Radio Flyer wagon made nicely into a covered wagon (with story props inside....kittens, snakes, baskets, etc.).



Joey was a great props manager, handing me just the right items at the right times. Here he is with the kitten puppet. One story involved a chicken who hatched a nest of duck eggs.



There was a kitten who kept the camp mouse-free, a bed of snakes stepped on by a brave little barefoot girl, a baby brother who needed to be tended and kept away from the campfire, children who learned to weave baskets from willow branches they collected, a stubborn little girl who insisted on carrying her small toy lion (made of cast iron), on a string around her neck all the way to the Salt Lake Valley since she was not allowed to put it in the handcart. There was a mother who carried her little boy on her shoulders on a harrowing journey across a river.

I had fun, and the Primary children were just wonderful. They were attentive the whole time. My first question was, "Do you know what a pioneer is?" To which one little Sunbeam responded enthusiastically, "I know, I know. They're green." She was so certain about this that I responded, "Well, they could be." (Hey, they could be wearing green.) To which she added, "and kind of prickly." Yes, this could also be true. Her mother and I later decided she must have been thinking of pine cones or pine trees, not pioneers. Close.



Above: We didn't think of bringing a camera to the picnic, but a few other people did, and snapped some pictures of me and the kids. (Thanks, Lisa!) The first one is when we were trying to gather them onto those blankets, which eventually filled up with children. The second one is me getting the puppet onto my hands.