“Tell us a bedtime story,” the niblings insist, because they know the ones I tell will be weird. So I oblige.
“You know the Hansel and Gretel story,” I said. They did.
“There’s more than one version of it, you know.” Historian that I am, I figured I’d slip them some education. “The guys who wrote the fairy tale books—Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm—were college professors looking for all the versions of all the fairy tales they used to tell in Germany. That’s why most of the fairy tales are kinda German. Even Aladdin, with the little-known version where the genie annexes the Sudetenland.”
They didn’t get that joke. That’s okay. It amuses me.
“So in this version of Hansel and Gretel, it goes this way.”