You can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread Man

I've been gone for a bit on vacation. I went to Texas to visit my family and went to the Sugarbowl. Go Utes!

This week I returned and had a storytime. It was a cookie storytime and in it I had a felt story of "The Gingerbread Man." I'm sure you all know the story of The Gingerbread Man how he jumped alive out of the oven and ran away from everyone exclaiming gleefully "you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man." Unfortunately this sugar-coated character met his demise from the crafty fox who told the Gingerbread Man "Come here friend and hop on my snout so your feet don't get wet as we cross the river." The Gingerbread Man did so and the fox ate him up in one gulp.

I was telling the story to the children and got to the point where the fox ate the The Gingerbread Man. I concluded, "and that was the end of the Gingerbread Man." There was silence from the children. Then one small voice asked, "the Gingerbread Man's dead?" The children were distressed. No child was smiling at the end of the story. The cute little character who ran from everyone met a horrible death in the jaws of a carnivore. I had to make an awkward segue into the next book with "Okay kids, uh, let's hear more about cookies in this next book..."

This made me realize that to kids, everything's alive, talking bears, dancing dogs, running Gingerbread Man, they're all equally real to them. So the story of The Gingerbread Man is probably not a gentle bedtime story to a three year old but a tragic death of a whimsical cookie.