A one time missionary told the story of two rugged mountain goats who met on a narrow pathway. On one side was a chasm 1,000 feet deep; on the other side, a steep cliff rising straight up. There was no room to turn around, and the goats could not back up without falling. What would they do? What do you think they should do?

Finally, instead of fighting for the right to pass, one of the goats knelt down and became as flat as possible. The other goat then walked over him, and they both proceeded safely.

In a sense, this is what you are suppose to do for your partner. You must be able to lie flat to allow your partner “walk over you” so that you can experience a relationship filled with humility, cooperation, love and care. So that you can experience a happy and successful long term relationship with your partner.

When your partner mistreats you, you must learn to be humble enough to let your partner walk over you if need be. This is not a sign of weakness but of strength and true humility if you want to keep your long term relationship from a break up. Women respects strength, humility and leadership in a man, but no one respects a tyrant.

To strengthen your long term relationship, is to lie flat for your spouse to “walk over you”, not tear your spouse down. You are both to be a blessing to each other and constantly help each other attain your live goals.

Nobody can be everything you want them to be, all the time. It is impossible to have a long term, loving relationship without learning to accept human weaknesses. So instead of dwelling on one anothers’ shortcomings, focus on your collective strength as a family.

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This is a really cute, yet a rustic addition to a child’s bed, and also has the additional excitement of producing a reward for a baby tooth!

You can make these out of any cotton fabrics, but my favorite has been to use well worn denim.

You will need 2 x pieces denim 7 inches square. I make a cardboard template for this, as I like to make lots of these pillows, and cut the squares out ahead of time. You will also need, the tiny inner pocket from a pair of jeans. They are usually found in the front pockets, or you can just use a tiny back pocket from a pair of child’s jeans.

Sew the tiny pocket on the front and center of one piece of denim, then sew the 2 pieces of denim together with the right sides showing ( wrong sides together) with a 1/2 inch seams on the outside. Leave enough space for stuffing, but don’t do this just yet.

Clip the outer seams into tiny strips about 1/4″ apart being careful not to clip the seam stitching, and then wash your little pillow and put it in the dryer, this will trigger your clipped seams to fray, which gives the pillow a soft yet rustic appearance.

Stuff the pillow with extra soft polyester fiber fill and then sew the seam shut. You now have a denim tooth fairy pillow. You put the tooth in the tiny pocket on the front, and keep the pillow on the bed, and the tooth fairy replaces the tooth with a special treasure for your child to discover the next morning.

These also make cute little pillows for the bed, and can be made from vintage fabrics, but I feel they look their best with the frayed fringe edges.

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Onions have been valued for thousands of years for culinary, medicinal and other uses. Some facts and folklore about the onion.

The common onion is part of the Allium or lily plant family, which includes garlic, chives, leeks and shallots. The onion gets its name from the Latin word uniowhich means ‘one’ or ‘single’, as onions are different than garlic, which produces many small bulbs while the onion produces only one. Traces of onions have been found in Bronze Age settlements dating back to 5000 B.C.E. Actual cultivation of onions by man is believed to have begun 4000 years ago in ancient Egypt. Alexander the Great fed his army onions with the belief that if they ate strong foods, they themselves would become stronger. Onions have strong antiseptic qualities, and their juice has been used for cleansing and healing wounds for centuries, all the way up to the American Civil War. When The Plague infected Europe, some believed it was caused by evil spirits. Some would wear strings of onions around their necks to try and protect themselves. Onions have also been used for other varieties of ailments through the centuries. In ancient India they were used as a diuretic, in China they were used for many things like liver disease, constipation and wound healing. In Colonial America eating a raw wild onion was thought to cure measles. There is medical research that proves onions are indeed a healthy vegetable. They can lower blood glucose, lower blood pressure, lower overall cholesterol, dissolve blood clots and help prevent cancer. There are two general categories of onions. Fresh spring/summer onions and storage onions. Fresh onions can be any color, some have their green stems attached. They are generally milder than storage onions. Storage onions can be red, yellow or white. They can range in flavor from mild to really strong, but most storage onions sweeten up and become mild when cooked. Everybody who has ever had to cut up a lot of strong onions knows what happens. It is literally a job that makes all of us cry. That is because onions contain sulfur, and when you cut the onion sulfur is released into the air. This air-borne sulfur reacts with the moisture in your eyes and creates a mild form of sulfuric acid! Your eyes tear up to flush this substance from your eyes. There are many ways to try and prevent crying while cutting up onions, some methods practical, some not. Some say cut them under water, or put them in the refrigerator an hour before cutting, or don’t cut the root end until last. Some have even suggested putting on a tight fitting swimming mask!

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Creating magical and fun letters and notes for your child does not take a great amount of artistic ability. Your child will love any type of letter or note and will add some very happy magic to your child’s tooth loss. Creating Tooth Fairy letters is not hard. It does not have to be extravagant really. Your child will love even a short note from the tooth fairy. It does not matter if you write a last minute note in the middle of the night or spend time and prepare for this fun and exciting visit. So here are 5 tips to help you get started:

Try to pick paper that your child will not see laying around the house. Kids are smart and they may become suspicious if the letter or note arrive on the same paper that mom writes her grocery list on. You can pick up some stationery for your project at the store for an affordable rate or simply use a blank piece of paper. Try to disguise your handwriting or even use a fun font on your word processing program. You dont want your child to recognize your handwriting. Take advantage of this moment to encourage your child to continue practicing good dental care. If your child knows the Tooth Fairy is watching and noticed good brushing your child is more likely to continue. Enclose some goodies in your Tooth Fairy letters. You can slip a few special stickers, a new tooth brush or any other little item you feel your child would like. Send notes and letters throughout the year when you notice your child is not brushing as they should and remind them that they need to care for their teeth throughout the year.

By sending Tooth Fairy letters to your child during this exciting time will add some magical and fun memories for you and your child. They will also make great keepsakes for albums that can be enjoyed as your child grows. It is not hard to create Tooth Fairy letters for your child. They do not have to be elaborate or fancy for your child to enjoy them. Your child’s toothless grin will prove that when they receive the Tooth Fairy letter in the morning.

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There is a new vampire movie in town called Twilight. Twilight is built on a best-selling novel featuring a forbidden love between a mortal girl, Bella, and an immortal vampire, Edward (1). Like Angel in the series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire-boy Edward is haunted by his own immortality and ‘stuck between two worlds’. Edward is the newest (and perhaps cleanest) of the breed that I would call the ‘good vampires’: he is an innocent as he has inherited his vampirism from his parents and, to top it all, avoids drinking human blood at all costs. His image made me think of the tendency in today’s pop culture to portray romantic, good vampires. Coppola’s Dracula, vampire Louis in Interview with the Vampire or Buffy’s Angel immediately spring to mind. This led me to wonder: what is the prototype of the ‘good vampire’? To find out, I thought to go back to the source of modern vampire stories. At the end of the line I re-discovered one legendary summer night back in 1816.

On a dark and stormy night in Switzerland, a few illustrious friends met at Lord Byron’s Villa Dorati (2). Amongst the invitees the most well known were Percy Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley; a less famous character was Dr. Polidori. Lord Byron came up with the idea of a contest: each should write their own supernatural tale. Out of this competition originated Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Yet, there was a second book that today is almost forgotten: Dr. Polidori’s The Vampyre. It is ironic that one rainy night could spawn two major twentieth century pop myths: Frankenstein and the Vampire (later called Dracula).

It might be worth to add that the two characters are quite morally opposite. Where Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein is a well-intended, if misguided, man whose thirst for knowledge ends up creating a monster, Polidori’s vampire is a monster that hides behind the image of a well-intended man. Is it perhaps that the ‘good vampire’ myth comes from Shelley’s Frankenstein? There are connections between the figures, but the vampire is not a Frankenstein-like man of science: he is usually portrayed as an aristocrat. Perhaps I should go deeper in analyzing Polidori’s vampire.

The Vampyre’s villain, Lord Ruthven, just as the later Count Dracula, is a refined, magnetic gentleman who mesmerizes everyone in his presence (3). Underneath this polished appearance, however, rests a predatory vampire that feeds on the living.

This now classical image of the vampire appears as a strange combination of folklore and culture. In folklore the vampire is little more than a monster, who comes back from the grave to suck the blood of the living (4). Yet Polidori’s vampire is something totally different: a sophisticated aristocrat that only incidentally sleeps in a grave. How did such a mutation come about?

Many suggest that the prototype of Lord Ruthven is Lord Byron himself (5). At the same time, we should not forget that Polidori was writing his work in an era when the concept of the Immortal had been introduced in literature by the seminal book of William Godwin (Mary Shelley’s father), St. Leon.

The novel features a charismatic nobleman, St Leon, who acquires the alchemical elixir of life from a mysterious man, Zampieri. St Leon is a benevolent gentleman whose ultimate motive is to aid mankind, but ends up being tortured by the curse of immortal life (6). It is the idea of obsessing with immortality that Godwin condemns, not St Leon himself. Yet, in writing his novel, Godwin establishes the literary image of the ‘cursed immortal’, the wanderer who can find no peace. The prototype was almost immediately taken up by Percy Shelley, Godwin’s son-in-law, who published an almost copycat version called St Irvyne or the Rosicrucian (7). Here, again, we have the noble gentleman, Wolfstein, that is offered promise of eternal life by a mysterious Italian called Ginotti. Yet Shelley’s version is conspicuously darker: Ginotti obtains the elixir from the Devil himself, and in a dramatic ending, the noble Wolfstein is burned to ashes while Ginotti loses his mind.

I don’t know that Polidori had read Godwin and Shelley, but I think this is very likely. Roberts has also briefly pointed out the association between Polidori’s Vampire and the immortal plot (8). In any case, the figure of the lone and aristocratic immortal, who wanders around the earth because of his cursed immortality, has definite affinities with Lord Ruthven and Count Dracula. Yet in Polidori’s work the lone aristocrat is combined with the evil figure of the ‘mystery stranger’ (Zampieri or Ginotti) and hence becomes a two-faced villain. By comparison, both Godwin and Shelley seem to regard the noble figure with certain sympathy: St Leon, after all, only errs on the side of our humanity, who is obsessed with youth and immortality. There is, in fact, strange actuality to St Leon and Wolfstein’s conundrum, which prompts the question: if someone offered you the gift of eternal life, wouldn’t you take it?

It is this sympathetic image of the immortal to which, I think, we can compare the current ‘good vampire’ motif, rather than Polidori’s and Stoker’s vilification. Polidori, of course, provided the vampire prototype; but Coppola’s Dracula, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Angel and Twilight’s Edward are more akin to Godwin’s unfortunate St Leon than to the evil Lord Ruthven. They are all ‘cursed immortals’ that pay the price of their immortality.

Since I am at it, I would like to further explore how Godwin’s St Leon inspired itself in the ambiguous image of the alchemist and particularly in the image of the mysterious Count of St Germain. Next.

References:

(1) Lady N1. (2008). Plot Summary for Twilight. Online. Available at: imdb.com/title/tt1099212/plotsummary. Accessed on 14 December 2008.
(2) Wikipedia. (2008). The Vampyre. Online. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre. Accessed on 14 December 2008.
(3) Polidori, J.W. (1819). The Vampyre. Online. Available at: books.google.com/books/p/pub-4297897631756504?id=k1VY81IOnpUC&dq=isbn:1605065692. Accessed on 14 December 2008.
(4) For instance, Murgoci, A. (1926). The Vampire in Romania. Folklore 7 (4), pp. 320-349.
(5) Switzer, R. (1955). Lord Ruthven and Vampires. The French Review 29 (2), pp. 107-112.
(6) Godwin, W. (1799). St Leon. London: Spottiswoode.
(7) Shelley, P.B. (1811). St Irvyne or the Rosicrucian. Kessinger.
(8) Roberts, M. (1990). Gothic Immortals. London: Routledge.

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