A blogger I follow gave a warning to "Make your reservations NOW as Valentine's day falls on a Saturday!" I say now is also a good time to look for a Valentine's Day story. Carolyn Sherwin Bailey often anthologizes holidays, so I'm not surprised to find she offered stories on the theme, but I liked best her story from an unusual book, Stories for Sunday Telling. In her Preface she says the book's purpose is to bring home "certain moral and spiritual facts" and goes on to say "Each leads in its scope and plot to an important life lesson which children will easily grasp and feel and apply."
WELL! That's probably not what you expect in a Valentine's Day story.
Never fear, this story isn't preachy.It does manage to bring in all that is needed to make a cookie. At the same time I wasn't overly happy with the name of the girl who receives the cookie. "Dear Heart" is horribly dated (just like spelling cookie as cooky). If I was telling it to only one child I would change it to that child's name. For a group I would just pick a name.
At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience. Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week. This is a return to my regular posting of a research project here. (Don't worry, this isn't dry research, my research is always geared towards future storytelling to an audience.) Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my other postings as often as I can manage it.
