Honey and Eggs, Peppermint and Bayberries

This week’s topic is a children’s book or character that really captured our imagination…what one didn’t capture mine?

I was read to a great deal as a child, and I remember so many. A few really found special places in my thoughts and heart.

One was a book about a “Mr. and Mrs. Peppermint.” Mr. Peppermint decided to explore the Arctic and his wife warned him not to fall of the top of the Earth. (I remember s picture of him walking up to the top of the globe.) While he was gone, Mrs. Peppermint sat knitting in a chair waiting to have a baby, whom she named “Chocolate.” I was very young and don’t remember any more about the book. Maybe it was the fact that my mother often topped her chocolate cookies with mint icing and made mint-iced chocolate cakes that kept the memory alive.

I do remember that both my mother and I enjoyed the story immensely, but I only saw it one time from a bookmobile.

Certainly the Tawny Scrawny Lion is embedded in my heart. I still have a copy which I read to my nieces, my sons and my grandchildren, who have now outgrown him, but that is one book that I am not giving away.

There was also the story of the bear who could not stay away from honey and got his nose stung many times. When he came in and kissed his wife on both ears she knew he had done something wrong; she had warned him to stay away from the old tree that had the beehive in it. It is a darling little book that I dearly loved and made my mother read many times. I think I had a copy for my nieces.

I do have a tattered copy of “Surprise For Mrs. Bunny” where all of her children, (Lolly, Rolly, Wally, Jolly, Molly, Polly and Dolly), decide to each color an egg for her birthday, but the last bunny got stuck for an idea and left his egg white…but that was the best one of all because it hatched! (It was a chicken egg. Now that I analyze it, it is rather specieist!)

I wish I had another lost one about a litter of puppies in a pet shop widow. Nixie, Trixie, Pixie and Dixie. Three were bought and had jobs, (one helped a nanny with a baby carriage, the spotted one went to a fire house), or great homes, (one rode in a convertible with a pretty lady), but one was left behind. Finally, the littlest one went home with a little girl who loved him/her.

But the one I think the story that is dearest to my heart is “The Little Mailman of Bayberry Lane.” I need to find a good copy of it.

The Little Mailman was a chipmunk and he delivered letters to patrons on his country route that was lined with, well, bayberries.

Mrs. Duck, Mr. & Mrs. Goose, Mr. Turtle were those he delivered mail to every day and way at the end of the lane and around the bend was Mrs. Pig. The Little Mailman always slowed down and put a bright smile on his face for the shy, lonely Mrs. Pig, who always stood hopefully at her mailbox, although she never received any letters.

As the Mailman walked home eating the delicious apple tart she had given to him, he got an idea to throw a party for Mrs. Pig at her house the next week, on her baking day. He invited all of her neighbors, who arrived with gifts, and his plan for her to make friends worked perfectly.

Perhaps the beautiful, soft illustrations added to the allure, but I think that to me as a shy, (often lonely), child, the story grasped and held a place in my heart.

Do any of you know this story, or any of the others?

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