Hello, you can call me “Half-Pint.”
Certainly that has been my secret, fondest wish ever since I was little and seriously obsessed with one very specific episode of Little House on the Prairie. It was called “Christmas at Plum Creek,” and it has taken me to get to this ripe old age to realize that perhaps I made that one special episode my entire personality.
This was the first season of Little House on the Prairie, when the Ingalls clan had just moved to Plum Creek and were building their little life together at their cabin. A cabin, which, I’m reflecting as I look around myself now, looks very much like my home: a very small log cabin with a big fireplace and questionable wiring and a well that loves to run dry every fall. If Pa Ingalls were here, he would laugh and roll his eyes and make a mild joke about not missing the water until the well runs dry, and I would, as Half-Pint, laugh up at him adoringly. I knew my role then, and I know my role now.
I yearned for Half-Pint status, especially at Christmas. I wanted her bedroom, her nightgowns, her braids. I wanted her dresses, her aprons, her bonnets — my God, her bonnets. I even wanted her farm chores. I would have happily mucked out the barn if Pa or Ma Ingalls asked me. Especially if it meant I got to have my very own pony named Bunny as she had… a pony so delightful that dreadful Nelly Oleson wanted to buy him from her. Of course, Half-Pint was not having it, and when she fought that spoiled Nelly, I was on her side as I was always on her side.
This was the year Half-Pint and her older sister Mary (who notably was not given an adorable nickname) were trying to figure out what to get Ma and Pa for Christmas. The notion that children would ever be more worried about what to get their parents for Christmas than their own gifts strikes me now as quaint and adorable. That is the thinking of a cynical woman, a grown person who is now more of a mother than a daughter.
But once upon a time, I was just a little girl, too, a daughter of a mother I wanted so desperately to please. And watching the two Ingalls daughters lie in their loft bed in their bonnets and nightgowns, side-by-side as they fretted over how to buy presents for Ma and Pa, I was that girl again — sleeping beside my younger cousin Katie when she came to stay with us for the weeks ahead of Christmas, the two of us whispering about our own wish lists and trying to outdo each other with our planned presents for our moms. Lies from me mostly: I whispered that I was going to buy her a red dress, a bicycle, 12 lipsticks. I would buy her the perfume from the commercial where that woman kicked her leg up and a bottle of Spumante Bambino, the sparking white wine with the catchy tune.
I remember it now, that feeling of wanting to be the person to give my mom something no one else had given her. When I watched Half-Pint [spoiler alert] sell her beloved pony to Mr. Oleson so that Nelly could claim him as her own, I understood her. She did it so she could buy Ma a new wood stove. I might not have done that because I desperately wanted a pony, name TBD, but I felt it in my bones what it was to want for my mother. And what it was to never be able to afford what I wanted.
The Ingalls, in their infinite homespun wisdom, felt no shame in their poverty. They sort of reveled in it. They were even, dare I say, a little smug about it. When Ma was selling extra eggs to buy Pa a new shirt, when Mary was working after school and chores to help a local woman so she could buy Pa a new shirt, when Pa was repurposing old wagon wheels to sell for presents — they all loved it. They bonded over it. Even little Carrie, a child I always forget existed, found a penny to buy Pa a star for the top of their Christmas tree, a present he enjoyed after snowshoeing out into the wilderness to shoot a giant turkey for their feast.
Their Christmas celebration culminated with Pa playing the fiddle while the girls danced in a circle with Ma. I needed this show this year — a lean year for me and my kids and everyone else I know. I am going to do second-hand Christmas and pretend that it’s just because I’m cosplaying as the Ingalls family. I am going to host a very earnest Christmas celebration at our cabin and try to force my family to dance in a circle as my partner plays holiday favorites on his mandolin.
I’m going to make a Little House on the Prairie Christmas happen. I’m going to become Half-Pint if it kills me.
