Princess Lolly: A Bedtime Story

- a post by Jeanna Mason Stay

Princess Lolly, as drawn by my daughter

My lovely oldest child turns eight this week. It is nearly impossible to express how fantastic this girl is. She is funny, loving, kind, smart, good, curious, and just all-around amazing. She’s the sort of kid I would have loved to be friends with when I was young. She’s enthusiastic about everything, and we just love her to pieces.

In honor of her birthday, and also because this story is part of a giant project I’m working on this month, tonight I am posting a story I used to tell her a lot when she was a little girl. Princess Lolly is one of the characters from the board game Candy Land, and she went on many adventures in our bedtime hours. This, however, is her original adventure.

Hope you enjoy something light and silly tonight!

      Once upon a time, Princess Lolly was walking along the path through Candyland to visit her friends. Now, Princess Lolly is always very, very sticky, but on this particular day she got even stickier.

      The first place she went was to visit Plumpy to eat some plums from his tree. Now, a normal person would pluck the plum from the tree first and then bite into it. But not Princess Lolly. She liked to bite the plums right off of the tree, which is not a very exact method of eating. It was rather messy in fact, and plum juice ran down her cheeks, making her face very, very sticky.

      Next she visited Mr. Mint in the Peppermint Forest. He was chopping down peppermint trees, and she volunteered to help. She wasn’t strong enough or old enough to use Mr. Mint’s ax, but she was very good at gathering the peppermint logs up against her chest and stacking them in piles. Of course, peppermint logs are candy, and gathering them made her arms and her chest very, very sticky.

      After she helped Mr. Mint for a while, she wandered off to see Jolly at the Gumdrop Pass. Gumdrop Pass was one of her favorite places to run and jump because every time she jumped on top of a gumdrop, her legs and feet would sink deep into it. As you can imagine, this made them—you guessed it—very, very sticky.

      Gramma Nutt was next on her list of friends to visit, and she loved to see Gramma Nutt because Gramma was always making a batch of her yummy peanut brittle. She stirred the brittle over a fire in a giant cauldron, and then she would pour it out into shallow pans to cool. Princess Lolly was not very patient, though, and when it was still far too warm to have hardened, Princess Lolly poked at it with her finger. Fortunately, it was not too hot to burn, but her hand did sink deep into the brittle, which made it very, very sticky.

      At this point, you can probably understand why Princess Lolly spends her whole life being so sticky, but trust me, it gets worse. Because just before the end of the day, just before she headed home to see her mother, Princess Lolly stopped off to see Gloppy in the Molasses Swamp. And the swamp looked so inviting that she jumped in and swam around. So even though there had been parts of her that were relatively clean before, now she was absolutely covered in molasses—and therefore, very, very sticky.

      “Mommy, I’m home,” she called out to her mother, Queen Frostine, when she arrived back at the Candy Castle.

      “Oh, my dear!” exclaimed Queen Frostine, smiling. “You are very, very sticky, darling. I think you need a bath before bed.”

      Princess Lolly agreed.

      But do you know where she bathes? In the Ice Cream Sea. And so, even though Princess Lolly got a bath that night, it was in ice cream, and so, at the end of all her adventures and the end of the day, Princess Lolly still ended up very, very, very sticky.