A Few Words at Easter from the Jelly Monsters about Chickens

Every year at Easter, people go on and on about the Easter Bunny and how cute bunnies are and so forth.  But does anyone ever give credit to our friends the Chickens?

I mean, Bunny rabbits are cute, we’ll grant you that.  But they don’t say much.  On the other hand, chickens never shut up.  You know the old saying about trying to sneak sunrise past a rooster:  well, try it.  Any farmer will tell you that those feathered alarm clocks are out there every morning cocka-doodle-doing away at first light.  They even beat the birds and sometimes even that guy that throws the newspaper at the front door from, like, a half a mile away.  Those guys ought to pitch for the Yankees.

Then, there are the hens: cluck, cluck, cluck: all day long.  What do they find to talk about?  Maybe how much it hurts to lay an egg?  Can you imagine what a din that endless clucking makes?  And the roosters chasing them around, crowing?  (Why do roosters crow?  They’re not crows — they’re roosters.  We bet Heckle and Jeckle had something to do with that).

(The author can testify about the noise.  He visited a chicken ranch as a small boy and can still hear them clucking.  He also noticed that the chickens were wearing metal eyeglasses.  Turns out chickens peck each other and peck even harder if they see blood.  So the owner of the ranch outfitted every chicken with a small metal pince-nez so they couldn’t see blood.  Sounds crazy doesn’t it?  Could the author have imagined it?  That’s what his teacher said when he got back to school and had to get up in front of the class and tell what he had been doing when he was supposed to be in school.  Crazy and made-up, she said.  He was a marked kid from then on).

Anyway, all credit to chickens.  Can you imagine what it’s like at a chicken ranch around Easter time?  All those eggs have to be laid (ouch!  Doesn’t that hurt?).  Then they have to be boiled.  (Some moms and grand fathers don’t even know how long it takes to boil an egg.  Can you believe it?  They have to look it up on the internet at Egg-a-Pedia).  Then the eggs have to be colored.  Of course, they all can’t be the same color.  Where’s the individuality in that?  We all can’t look alike.  Then everyone might get along.  Anyway, coming up with different colors must be a huge challenge for the egg dye manufacturers every year.  But we digress.  Once all the eggs are colored, they are wrapped up in that green grass stuff that sticks to your fingers and gets all over the place, and then packed into baskets and sent all over the world.  There they are hidden around the house or around town on village greens for the traditional Easter Egg Hunts.  Does anyone ever wonder what happens to those eggs the kids don’t find?  Don’t even think about it.  Maybe the town’s Fire Chief has to get up next morning and search around for the missing eggs. You should ask him.

Then of course, what about all those eggs that have to be hatched to provide the chicks that the smart country clubs give the member’s children on Easter Day?  First the chicks have to be rounded up by chicken wranglers with special dye squirt guns.  You can see these wranglers running like crazy all over the ranch chasing the little baby chicks, trying to lasso them with tiny ropes and then holding them down by their tiny claw feet and spraying them.  Everything usually get sprayed in the mêlée, so the wranglers end up looking like two-legged Easter eggs in chicken cowboy hats.

So then dear readers, on this lovely sunny Easter, please try and remember our friends the chickens, and all the happiness they have brought you this day.

Hope you’re not having roast chicken for dinner!

Happy Easter From all the Jelly Monsters

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY

Or

Where Do Jelly Monsters Come From?

One day whilst they were sitting under the story tree near her grandmother’s house, the little red-haired girl asked her grandfather about St. Patrick

It was an unseasonably warm day in an unseasonably warm March in an unseasonably warm winter, and St. Patrick’s Day was almost here. 

“Well, you know about St. Patrick and the Jelly Monsters, don’t you,” he asked.

“I’ve been wondering Grandad, some people don’t believe in the Jelly Monsters,” she replied.  “Even with the Jelly Monster web site, I mean.”

“Well, of course — they can’t see them, can they?  It’s their loss anyway,” he said.  “But we can see them, can’t we Annie?  And talk with them and everything else.  It’s like Santa Claus I guess — a matter of faith.”

With that, a fat little creature jumped out from behind the tree, pulled up a rock and sat down with a satisfying plop.

“What in Heaven’s name…” the grandfather began.

“Well now, it’s not heaven should concern you my good man,” the creature said.  “I’m here to tell you about St. Patrick and the Jelly Monsters if you’d shut yer gob for a minute.” 

“My name is Shamus Sean Festus O’Toole,” he continued almost without a breath, “but you can call me by my Jelly Monster name: Mr. O’Donovan.”

“Oh?”

“No, O’Donovan”

“Oh.”

“No….Oh, never mind.  Just call me Donovan.  Anyway, Da duit!  That means hello, or good morning, or God Bless,’ or some such.  At least, I think it does.  I got it off the internet.  .  One of those translation things; I don’t speak the Irish meself.  But I digress.  Did I ever tell you I saw Maureen O’Hara once?  Or maybe it was Bono.’”

How to describe Mr. Shamus Sean Festus O’Toole?  I mean…Donovan.  He did look somewhat like what a leprechaun — green plug hat, white stockings and buckled shoes, empty clay pipe stuck in his mouth (he didn’t smoke) and a long green tail coat that flapped around his ankles.  But there was more – much more, because a green forked tail snaked out from beneath the coat and twitched when he laughed.   He had a lovely shamrock tucked behind each ear, which smiled at you if you looked closely.

His skin turned a bright green when he lied, which to be sure was a great deal of the time: put Donovan  in front of one of the palm trees that grow along O’Connell Street in Dublin while he was in the middle of a great fib, and he’d be invisible.  

He wore white, three-button gloves which had a habit of patting his round little tummy when he was pleased with himself, which was also a good deal of the time; especially when he was spinning one of those same great fibs.

Now, they say that an Irishman, if you ask him a question, will answer with another question.  Try him:

“Is that true Mr. Donovan,” Annie asked.

“Is what true?” he replied.

“That an Irishman will answer a question with another question?”

“Now who told you that?” the wee creature shot back.  “Anyway, I’ll ask the questions meself:  Where do the Jelly Monsters come from; isn’t that what you wanted to know?  And are they from Ireland and did they know St. Patrick?  ”

“Weel, it’s a long story,” he began, answering his own question, and rocking back upon his rock, the white gloves patting his green tummy musingly.   

“First off, pay no mind to your grandfather with his tales of England and how he and his father were named for your great-great grandfather who was landlord of the Rose and Crown pub in Northamptonshire.  Probably most of the relatives lined up along the country lanes tugging their foreknots as the gentry cantered by, the family being from a long line of agricultural workers and such.   Maybe even highwaymen or horse thieves.

“Oh, you’re English true.” Donovan continued, “but the blood of the Celts — Scots and Irish — runs rich and strong in your veins from all sides of your family.   Lowland Scots and Highland Scots and even those from the Misty Isles are all part of your heritage. 

“Say, did you know you can stand on one of the Isles up in the Heb rides and see across to Northern Ireland, where some others of your ancestors sprang from.  County Down, it was.   Ask your granda, he’s done it.”

“Excuse me, Mr. . . Donovan,” the Jelly Monsters?  Ireland?” Annie reminded him.

”Ah, to be sure.  Where was I?   (“Nice polite girl.” He thought).  Call me Donovan,” he said. 

“Well now young miss, the Jellymonster’s absolutely came from Ireland.  Sitting here before you is just the boyo to spin the tale.”

   By now the little girl’s eyes were beginning to resemble bright blue saucers as they so often did when a story set her imagination loose. 

“In the beginning,” he explained, “we were originally called Potato Monsters, and we lived all over Ireland, north and south, some even traveling with the tinkers.  I meself am from Dublin as are the others of me branch.   We lived in the Shelbourne Hotel across from St.  Stephen’s Green, way down in the cellars in tiny rooms where the local help hides from the managers.  Me pal Duganmonster now, he lived over in the Guinness Brewery, inside the empty casks, which had its rewards, if you get my meaning.  But that’s another story.

“Others lived in Trinity College in the great old library where the Book of Kells is kept.  They are the ones that make the floor creak so wonderfully, them running back and forth underfoot among the stacks. 

“Speaking of creaks, we certainly made the hallways of the Shelbourne creak.  That we know. “

            “The hallways creak the way they do because the original part of the hotel was built in 1824,” granddad interjected, “and by the way, the hallways were made extra wide to accommodate the ladies hoopskirts.”

            “Is that a fact, granda,” Donovan smirked.  “Aren’t you the one, then.  Let me just plunge ahead here without further interruption? 

            “People started blaming these Potato Monsters for the great famine of the 1840’s.  That wasn’t good for these tuber-munching trolls and elves, and it was also untrue.  Poor land management was the culprit, but that didn’t make the starving any easier – for the poor and for anyone else. 

            “It did get your granda’s Irish family over here in the 1840’s, of course.  But that was a sad thing – them coming right off the boat in New York harbor and impressed into the Union Army, or taken into the gangs and them not even citizens yet.  And then poor beautiful Cameron Diaz being hit by a cannonball …”

            “Donovan!” the grandfather cried, “that’s a plot from a movie!”

            “Oh, you’ve seen it.  Oops.  Well, back to me tale: “anyway, they say when St. Patrick chased the snakes out, some of the Jelly Monsters took offense and left as well, seeing as several of them had snakes for hair like that Medusa lady from myth-e-ology.  And was old Saint Patrick chasing the little people out along with the snakes, shouting:”  ‘git along w’ ye, yez blithering eejets, ye whipperty gibbits.’ I can hear it still,” the little man sighed.” 

            “No one talks like that,” muttered granddad…

            “Excuse me, Mr. Donovan,” said Annie, holding up her hand.  “Didn’t St. Patrick live a very long time ago, before they even had hotels?”

            “Yes, wasn’t it back in the fourth or fifth century,” added her grandfather. 

            “Wot,” gasped Donovan.  The gloves stopped patting his tummy and flew up in astonishment:

            “A bold-faced lie!  No, now wait, let me think.  Oh yes, now I remember.  This is the way it truly happened:

            “St.  Patrick did chase a bunch of the various monsters away back then.  I’m not sure about the snakes.  I’m recalling the old boy with his white beard and staff claimed that there were so many of us Jelly Monsters underfoot and all, that we were becoming a nuisance.  So he began jumping up and down and around, thumping about, over hill and dale, chasing all before him.  Out through the fields and into the villages, stomping and stamping his great feet all around him. 

            “Now of course, Jelly Monsters are invisible as we all know, so no one else could see them (the good Patrick could of course, him being a saint and all).  But the young girls and lads thought dear St. Patrick was warming up for the ceiliedh that evening (that’s a traditional Gaelic social gather, dear child).”
            So the young people started dancing as well — heel and toe, heel and toe — all in line as graceful as can be, their arms at their sides.  The musicians came out of the pubs with their fiddles and drums and penny whistles and began to play.  Old Paddy Albert came out with his Irish bag pipes and sat down and pumped away with the rest, and soon the whole village square was alive with dancing figures.”

            “Wait a minute Donovan,” the grandfather nearly shouted, “you’re not saying…”

            “Exactly so, that’s how Irish step dancing began.”

            “But what about the Snakes,” Annie asked, unwilling to let anything scary get past without causing a delightful shiver or two. 

            “Ah well, there were no snakes in Ireland,” Donovan confessed.  “It’s an island you know.”

            “That’s probably true about the snakes,” her grandfather whispered to her, “but the rest of it is unbelievable.”

            “Mr. Donovan,” Annie cried.  “You’re turning bright green!”

            And so he was: the white gloves sprang to his face to hide the spreading green tide swelling up from his neck.

            “Well, at least it hides the blushing caused by those outrageous lies,” her grandfather said.  “That is, if he can blush.”

            “Well now,” Donovan replied, “what’s the good of being a wee creature on St. Patrick’s Day if you can’t spin a few tall tales for a nice little red-haired girl.

            “Now Miss Annie, “he said, popping up from his rock and holding out his hand. 

“I understand your grandmother Bobs makes a very fine green cupcake in honor of the day.  Shall we pay her a visit for a wee snack?”

The End©