Dead Winter's Night

Story Time

I decided to do this page in part because I wanted to share something that relaxes me and helps to improve my mood. As a child, I had this magazine called Storyteller which came with an audio cassette of stories and poems that were in the magazine which you could listen to. I recently found that people had made videos shots of the magazine, along with the audio and I will be posting links to my favourite ones here. I owe my love of stories and reading to that magazine and I'm glad that I came across them. I've also found a number of youtube channels where you can watch old 80's cartoons which are run by the company that created them and I will post them here. I hope people find this page relaxing and a good distraction from the stress that life brings.

Winter/Yule/Christmas Themed Stories

As it is December at the moment of writing this (and 10 days before Christmas), I've decided that the first lot that I want to share are stories which could be considered winter or Christmas Stories. It might not always be obvious at the start of the story, but here they are. Some of them are quite humorous.

The Gobbolino Stories

The first Gobbolino story was one of my favourites from Storyteller. (It's also in an actual novel for children, and the Storyteller version is very abridged.) I only had the first 15 issues of Storyteller (which was annoying, because I missed the ending of two of my favourite stories in the magazine because of this, in addition to a couple of the tapes getting eaten by the cassette player, which was (annoyingly) an all too frequent occurance with tapes. There was another series, called Storyteller 2, which I was unaware of its existance until I found them online, and so, there are two multi-part Gobbolino stories and both are quite charming.

Gobbolino

Gobbolino And The Little Wooden Horse

Dot and the Kangaroo

This is another one of my favourites from Storyteller. (I tend to have a liking for the longer stories which were released in multiple parts and which were around 10 minutes long each.) Now, Dot and the Kangaroo is perhaps one of the first stories written because the author was concerned about what was happening to wildlife and their habitat at the hands of humans. Because Austrlia is isolated, and has a lot of unique, ingenious wildlife that is found no where else on the planet, the wildlife are quite vulerable when it comes to disruption. They have lost many species - one of the most famous is the Thylacine, or Tasmanian Wolf/Tiger, which sadly became extinct in the 1920's, and the Tasmanian Devil is under threat from an infectious cancer. Aside from South America, it is the only place in the world where you will find Marsupials and a great deal is made in the story of the Platypus (the reason being that it is a Monotreme and one of the few surviving speices of mammal that lay eggs.) You can find the full story for free on Project Gutenberg.

Heidi

Heidi was a story I found when I came across Storyteller online, as it was in issues which I never had. I liked the description of the mountains and having lived in a city for a time myself it resonated with me with feeling better in more rual surroundings. Like Dot and the Kangaroo, the full version can be found on Project Gutenberg and it goes into more detail regarding the characters, but it is a bit old fashioned in some parts with some emphasis on Christianity which is probably to be expected for children's stories of that age, but it didn't effect my enjoyment of the story. It's also a story about over coming trauma and loss, espeaically in regards to to Heidi's grandfather who becomes a recluse because of it until Heidi slowly chips away at it and makes him become more socialable again. If you have the time, reading the full version is worth it as you miss quie a bit of the story in the Storyteller version.