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“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Henry David Thoreau
Stories
First published in The Children’s Book of Thanksgiving Stories in 1915, this French fairy tale by P. J. Stahl tells of a kingdom so obsessed with sweets that their king orders a colossal tart to satisfy them, only for indulgence to bring ruin. A gently comic lesson in moderation and gratitude.
In Fannie Wilder Brown’s The Thanksgiving Goose, a boy’s complaints about his Thanksgiving dinner lead him to a neighbor’s bustling kitchen, where a family with little to spare is joyfully making mince pies. Their simple gratitude teaches him a quiet lesson in thankfulness, just in time for the holiday.
In Perrault’s Donkey-Skin, the grotesque and the marvelous collide: a princess, pursued by her father’s delusion, cloaks herself in a beast’s hide and vanishes into obscurity. She keeps her splendor hidden until a ring, slipped unnoticed into a cake, reveals her secret and restores her to love, dignity, and a rightful place in the world.
A wily blacksmith traps a demon through wit and iron, only to discover that bargaining with darkness never ends cleanly. Ralston’s folktale hums with the clang of hammers and hellfire, where cleverness courts damnation and escape is always partial at best.
Modern Ghosts explores how specters have adapted to the styles and anxieties of modern fiction, shifting from the sprawling Gothic novel to the sharper, more psychological short story, and expanding their powers from pallid wraiths to vivid, corporeal, and even humorous presences. No longer bound to castles or midnight hours, these ghosts haunt trains, bedrooms, and everyday lives, reminding us that while mortals fade, the ghost never goes out of fashion.
Discover the rise of the Gothic novel as the foundation of supernaturalism in modern English literature, exploring its roots in medievalism, its reliance on haunted settings, ghosts, witches, devils, and its role in shaping themes of terror and mystery. And learn how Gothic fiction introduced new narrative conventions — castles, storms, dreams, and madness — that influenced both later Romantic works and supernatural storytelling.
Parties
Friendsgiving
Where Thanksgiving insists upon ritual, Friendsgiving thrives on invention. Its visual language is culled from the eccentric margins of history: an etched turkey with exaggerated plumage, children dwarfed by improbable gourds, abstracted florals painted in jewel tones. These fragments, reshaped into placemats, puzzles, invitations, and table dressings, turn the table into a stage for chosen family.
Crafts
Halloween Shop
Christmas Shop
