The True Meanings of Nursery Rhymes: Mother Goose was one sick lady :(

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!!! I wish someone had said this to me before I poked my big nose around the Internet for this post. This all began when I was watching Shrek with my daughter. Innocent movie night turned into a nightmare for me. If you haven't seen it, Shrek's cast includes many characters from common nursery rhymes your kids, and probably you, sung as a child. I thought it was cute that the Three Little Pigs, Puss and Boots, Three Blind Mice, Gingerbread Man, and many more had offbeat humor until I saw Rumplestiltskin....and I thought to myself, "Dang, What's his story?" So like every other person who wants a quick answer, I hit the web. Rumplestilskin's story was pretty bad...and it's what else I found that terrified me...Turns out those innocent stories and rhymes are incredibly depressing, terrifyingly violent, and just plain tragic! I'm so disturbed...
1. Jack and Jill

I believe you are familiar with this one. In this rhyme, Jack fell down and “broke his crown” (which basically means severely injured his head – I suppose this can possibly be deadly) after he and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Soon afterwards, he goes home only to endure terrible pain when he “went to bed and bound his head with vinegar and brown paper”. Oh, it doesn’t stop there. Jill gave an evil grin when she saw Jack’s silly paper plaster. Unfortunately, their mother saw this smirk and got really angry and whipped her quite soundly for the whole incident

2. Ring Around The Rosie
Your kids are merrily singing and swaying to a song about the BUBONIC PLAGUE, which refers to the Black Death Plague. The "plague" of 1347-50, which killed perhaps 1/3 of the population of Europe.
---"Ring around the Rosie"--refers to a red mark, supposedly the first sign of the plague Some even suggest this was a sexually transmitted disease outbreak and the "Rosie" refers to a woman's vagina.
---"A pocket full of posies"-- refers to sachets of herbs carried to ward off infection, also said to be a pocketful of flowers to bring to a funeral of a fallen.
---"Ashes, ashes" --either a reference to the cremation of plague victims or to the words said in the funeral Mass..."Ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Sometimes line three is rendered as "Atischoo, atischoo"--sneezing, another sign of infection.
---"We all fall down." -- This really needs no explanation.
Whoa.

3. The Pied Piper

In the tale of the Pied Piper, we have a village overrun with rats. A man arrives dressed in clothes of pied (a patchwork of colors) and offers to rid the town of the vermin. The villagers agree to pay a vast sum of money if the piper can do it – and he does. He plays music on his pipe which draws all the rats out of the town. When he returns for payment – the villagers won’t cough up so the Pied Piper decides to rid the town of children too! In most modern variants, the piper draws the children to a cave out of the town and when the townsfolk finally agree to pay up, he sends them back. In the darker original, the piper leads the children to a river where they all drown (except a lame boy who couldn’t keep up). Some modern scholars say that there are connotations of pedophilia in this tale. Ironically, a modern day singer accused referred himself as the Pied Piper...but that's a whole nother topic...

4. There Was An Old Woman Who Lived in A Shoe

This old woman actually lives in a big shoe with her “oh so many” children. She doesn’t really even know what to do with them. It seems that she’s poor, stressed out and her children are pretty neglected. She doesn’t even have any bread to go with the broth she made to feed her children. In any case, after she fed them, she beat them all thoroughly and put them to bed. She seems to be quite far from the ideal mother as well as poor, and abusive. What a mom…

5. Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater

“Peter Peter pumpkin eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her!
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her very well!”
This is about a man named Peter who loved to eat pumpkin. He had a wife but he couldn’t keep her for some reason – probably neglected her. So what does he do? He stuffs her into a pumpkin shell and keeps her permanently in there. I don’t know whether his wife would still be alive after an incident like this but realize that this pumpkin must be a pretty massively giant sized pumpkin. Okay, so he probably forget about the first wife. Soon after that, Peter gets married to another lady whom he didn’t love at first. Peter who was also illiterate (a real find as far as husband material goes) eventually learns to read and finally starts to love his wife – from the second marriage. Talk about a Douchebag.

6. Mary Mary Quite Contrary

While it seems like simple nonsense, it actually may be a nice little ditty about mass executions.

Mary Mary quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

The Mary being referred to is believed by many to be “Bloody Mary,” the Catholic queen of England who did a pretty good job of filling graveyards with Protestants. The garden referred to is actually a graveyard.
The “silver bells and cockle shells” are instruments of torture. You don’t even wanna’ know what they did. I quickly escaped that Internet site.

I pretty much stopped there...Mother Goose was one sick lady and you're officially prepared for ruining your kid's Halloween parties with these horror stories!