A fairy ring is a ring of mushrooms or stones on grass or in a forest. It is a place where fairies dance, or have danced. Fairies are known for their revelry and their love of dancing. Many nights are devoted to feasting and partying and dancing, and traces of these revels are left over in the form of these rings.
While this seems harmless and fun, fairy rings can be very dangerous to humans. If a human were to walk into a fairy ring there is a chance of that person being transported to the fairy realm, and once there there's no telling if or when you might return home again.
Pixie Pop, or the original name Gokkun! Pucho, is a 3 volume long manga about a girl who meets a little pixie. The girl, Mayu, is starting her first day of high school and has to sit beside the boy whom she confessed her love to on the last day of elementary school and rejected her. Her family owns a cafe and Mayu is very picky about what she drinks. When she gets home after her first day of school and starts cry into one of her drinks after think about the first time she met this boy. After her tears fall into the drink is starts to turn all of the colours of the rainbow. She passes this off as one of her mother's experiments and drinks it anyway. Right after she does this little pixie comes out and gets angry at her, telling her that drink was what she needed to become an adult. Mayu thinks that she's dreaming and drinks some milk to wake herself up (I don't know why) but all this does is make her grow into a giant. From that point on anything she drinks, with the exception of water, makes her magically transform. The story is about unrequited love, not exactly my personal favourite, but to each their own.
Here is a website with a brief plot synopsis and series info as well as some customer reviews
If you want to read this manga but aren't sure if you'd actually buy it, you can read it on various online manga sites. It's a good way to screen out the ones that aren't worth the money.
Here's a cool little video a fan put together summarizing the story
This tv show hasn't been released yet, but is a spin-off of the popular kids show Winx Club, which I previously discussed here. In Winx Club, a show about a girl named Bloom who finds out she's a fairy and goes off to fairy school, each of the fairies have a little pixie that follows them around. Apparently these pixies were a big hit with viewers because the creators decided to give them their own show. According to http://unadinoi.wordpress.com/2009/06/04/new-series-pop-pixie/ the show was set to be released either spring or fall of 2010, as spring has passed I would assume it will come out in the fall. And there will be 52 13- 15 minute episodes.
Here is the website to be, as of currently it only says coming soon, but I'm sure this link will be of more use when the show comes out and the site is updated http://www.poppixie.com/coming.php
This is a cheesy little movie from the 90′s that is both a coming of age story and a concert on film. The story is about this young girl who gets a bike for her birthday, but when she gets it she realizes that she can’t ride it. She doesn’t want her friends to know that she can’t ride a bike because they might laugh at her and falls into a bout of self-pity. At this point a ‘troll’ appears in a tree and tells her that she can give the girl the secret to riding a bicycle, but first she must do a favour. The troll gives her a ticket that lets her go into a tree to this underground world, which is a theatre. The troll gets her to be a backstage assistant and then tells her that the production was for a birthday party and the birthday boy was missing, so the girl has to go find him. During this time she meets various people and then these people perform on stage in front of an audience also dressed up as ‘trolls’, which just means they have some feathers and glitter on, but it looks like a live filming of a concert. Some of the performers are Robert Munsch, Fred Penner, Rockapella, etc. So the girl follows a trail of broken candles and ends up finding the birthday boy, who is a dragon. Unfortunately, the dragon doesn’t want to go on stage to blow out the candles because he can’t blow fire, which he must do on this birthday. The girl then motivates the dragon to just keep trying and to believe in himself and not to give up, and then he ends up breathing fire and lighting his birthday cake. The troll sends the girl back to her own world but before she can tell her how to ride a bike the girl says that she already knows what she has to do and then just keeps practising until she can ride.
This clip can be found in the clip below, so if you're going to watch that skip this... but if you aren't going to sit through 15 minutes, here's the clip with the troll.
I really liked this movie when I was a kid, cheesiness and all. I liked watching the performances and I liked the story too. Definitely not the best of the 90′s but fun none the less.
Here is the first part of the movie. In this clip there are the artists Rockapella, Jackie Richardson, and Robert Munch telling Mortimer
Arthur Rackham has created some of my favourite faerie art. Chances are that his work or style will be familiar to those who have never heard of him before and are not into fairy art. He was an english illustrator who live from 1867 – 1939.
Acheri are disease spirits in India's folk tradition. These spirits live in the mountains and come down to the villages at night. They take the form of innocent little girls, either unknown children or the ghosts of little girls who have died to disease. She looks for those her own size (that size being a child's size obviously), and if she casts her shadow upon a person he or she will become fatally ill.
One can ward off these spirits however, with the colour red. They will not harm those who are wearing the colour red. So if you tie a red scarf or a red thread around a child's wrist or neck, they will be safe from the Acheri.
This book didn’t really have a plot, but was more of a celebration of imagination. The illustrations are very colourful and magical and I really enjoyed the overall concept of the book. Each page has an illustration of a person and his or her dragon. One person’s dragon is very large, another’s is very small, another’s breathes fire, another ice, etc. the objective of the story was more to impress on a kid that it is ok to have an imagination and it’s also ok if that imagination is different from everyone else’s. Ursula Le Guin wrote an essay called 'Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons’, discusses earlier in this blog here, and it was talking about how people are afraid to admit he or she plays with their imagination or has moments of make believe or are too embarrassed to admit to liking fantasy or make believe. For a kid, or even an adult, I think this is a nice little book to say just the opposite, that you should embrace your ‘dragon’ because it’s as unique as you are.
For those who don't know what oracle cards are, they're a little bit like tarot cards. They help to tell the future. You ask a question and then pick a card, basically. There is typically a picture and a message on the card and the card you draw may have some significance to your life. What makes this deck a little bit different from other decks and somewhat relevant to this blog is that when you ask a question, you ask the fairies.
Faerie Organic is a website where you can buy all natural, organic skin care products and make up. The woman who created this line and who I would assume facilitates the website, make all of the products from natural ingredients, no chemicals or artificial additives. In the About Us section she calls herself a 'kitchen chemist' and is very much for the back to nature movement. She had a bad experience with 'synthetic medication' and when she looked into alternatives she found natural products that accomplished the same end as the synthetic product. There is also an ethical point she brings up about there being a real FDA regulation on cosmetics and that many of the large name brands still have lead in some of their products.
The site sells make up- from foundation to mascara, skin care products, acne medicine, etc.
There is also a handy little section right on the website for people who have to deal with acne. She lists a bunch of tip you can do throughout your day to help calm down your acne. Many of the tips mention chemicals, like changing your shower head to filter the chemicals out of your water, or the chemicals in your shampoo, and there are also every day things you should do like exercise, drink water, wash your pillow, etc. An interesting page for those with issues. Here.
A Fairy Tale is a tile flipping game mini game you can download for your computer. Kind of like a majhong/ solitaire idea. There is a story line to this game and that is to help the fairies save the forest, which you can do by completing different levels. Games like these are horrible for me, I can lose hours playing... so why not get one that's fairy themed?
This is a fairy tale about a princess whose father goes mad with grief over the loss of his wife and tries to marry his own daughter. To avoid this she runs away from home, in a donkey skin dress, to become a servant in a foreign kingdom. Kind of like The Goose Girl.
A nixie, also known as a melusine, is a shape-shifting fairy that inhabits fresh-water springs and rivers. Nixies usually present themselves in half human half animal form, the animal half being typically a fish or serpent, like a mermaid. Sometimes nixies have wings as well.
Nixies can be harmless or harmful depending on the tradition. Some traditions portray nixies somewhat like sirens, luring humans to a watery grave. Other traditions, like the story here, present the nixie as an essentially harmless creature able to coexist and even prosper in the human world, given the right conditions.
I'm sure you wouldn't think that you've ever seen a nixie/ melusine in your day-to-day routine, but I can guarantee you that you have. The lady in the Starbucks logo is a nixie! The tail was more visible in older versions of the logo, but according to the site the image is from, the new logo Starbucks will be coming out with will have the old image on it. To be honest this might already exist, I don't go to Starbucks often, and when I do I'm not looking at the logo. But interesting no?
Faeries is an animated film about a sister and a brother, Nellie and George, who are sent to live at a relative's farm for a time. They are somewhat unhappy about this, Nellie in particular. Once they're settled in, the children go out to play. George wants to play hide and seek and scampers off to hide from Nellie, and while she isn't looking, disappears into a tree. While looking for George, a creepy looking man (Jeremy Irons!) appears and tells her of a prophecy. She is a little shaken by this stranger and runs back to the house (not seeing him turn into a crow and fly away). She gets back to the house and continues her search for her brother and comes across a hobgoblin in her cupboard. It appears as though her brother has gone into the fairy realm, and Nellie must hurry and bring him back before he eats something and is unable to return. The goblin takes her to the faery tree and she goes in to find her brother. When she does get to him though, he has already eaten faery food and cannot return to the human realm ever. Nellie calls the faery king and pleads for the release of her brother. The king contents to give them three quests, and if they complete these quests, George will be able to leave fairy land. The nature of the quests change after the prince see's the farm hand Brigit (Kate Winslet). There is also the matter of the shape shifter, who is after the fairy king's throne. It is of course up to Nellie and George to save the day.
This film has a mix of both classic 2D animation as well as an early 3D animation style. For the most part the classic cartoon animation is used for the characters and the background, but several movement shots are done in 3D. Fairy land might have been real life foam fauna as well.
This is the first book in a delightful series for young readers about fairies called The Fairy Chronicles.
This book is about a young girl named Beth who is going to spend some time with her eccentric aunt, and she is not looking forward to it one little bit. When she gets there however, her aunt informs her that the both of them are fairies! Beth has the spirit of a flower fairy in her, and her flower is the marigold, making her a marigold fairy. So after Beth transforms into her fairy form and meets other fairies and gets her very own wand. All of the flower fairies have a wand made out of something different and Beth's is a pussy willow branch. All is going well and Beth is just beginning to learn how to be a fairy when she hears that the brownies have lost the feather of hope, the source of all hope, to the gremlins. Beth, must figure out how to be a fairy as well as her special ability (because in these books each of the fairies have a different ability) while she goes after the feather. She has the help of some new friends and convinces her dog, Peanut, to help out as well.
I thought that this book was a fresh take on an old idea. The author keeps the reader's attention throughout the story and created interesting and dynamic characters in such a short time.
What is also great about these books is at the end of the story there is a little fact section dedicated to talking about some of the things in the book. For example there may be an explanation of certain mythological character or tradition, or it might discuss a certain plant or animal, or a holiday. Each book has something different at the back. Definitely worth looking into.
This is the series website where you can learn more about the books and even read some excerpts online. http://www.fairychronicles.com/
Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fairy_Ring_0004.JPG
Image from http://princesslilo.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/pixie-pop-rules/
Image from http://wwww.fanpop.com/spots/the-winx-club/images/12529864/title/pop-pixie-photo
Image from http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/images/3/35/Acheri.jpg
Image from http://www.1840on.co.uk/Collectingpages/POSTCARD%20COLLECTING/POSTCARD%20COLLECTING%20INTRODUCTION.htm
Image from https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg87M8qPK22SDoHAEVq1I_QCs-oDJNH5LKwqFDRSrTlK3pSGVHnfwLGl-tVd4YjVo8MGMwoj1wHw5Ww-K7H-AYz0i64QoZolLvvdNQUsbFFInuEnTJDROwFUTKKAOU5n5w1ZiJHLgCXBJ4/s1600-h/YellowSands_Maybank.jpg
Image from http://www.stormjewelsgifts.com/Doreen-Virtue-Cards/1382-magical-messages-from-the-fairies-oracle-cards.html
Image from http://membres.multimania.fr/mandragores/melusine.html
Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mélusine.JPG
Image from http://www.seriouseats.com/2008/04/the-changing-face-of-starbucks.html
