There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell! She Must Have an Iron Constitution...

Progressive songs and stories are popular with children, whether it’s The 12 Days of Christmas or The House That Jack Built. One of the most classic of these tales is the silly There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Rather gruesome but nonetheless amusing, it chronicles a succession of ever-larger animals that one very eccentric woman eats before she finds one creature that proves to be too much for her.

Lucille Colandro’s There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell! takes that same idea and transfers it to a Christmas situation. Instead of gobbling spiders and dogs, this woman ingests gifts and a sleigh. The only living thing she eats is eight reindeer - but considering that one horse did the traditional little old lady in, that ought to be more than enough to stop her in her tracks!

The original song never did make much sense. Colandro tries to give this old lady more of a purpose in all of her eating, but to me, it only comes across as all the more nonsensical. For one thing, the reindeer are the only objects on her list that would generally be considered edible. Bells, bows and a sack? Not so much. And the sleigh, which is several times her size, is just bizarre. Her innards must be somehow akin to Mary Poppin’s magical carpetbag, with an endless capacity for accommodating objects. But why does she do all this gobbling? Why, so she can spit everything back up so Santa can make his annual rounds!

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the idea of receiving a present that has spent time on the inside of an old lady. And after such an ordeal, I would think those poor reindeer would be too addled to fly, even though they come prepared with full flight gear. Beyond the absurdity of all that, I find it a little grating that after this succession of very specific Christmas images, the book concludes with a generic “Happy holidays to all!”

Jared Lee’s illustrations are cartoonish but textured, with particular attention paid to the fur on the reindeer and the old lady’s dog. The old lady wears a skirt and striped stockings, and that’s about the only tip-off in the pictures that she is, in fact, female. Her hair is longish too, but it’s very stringy and could easily be a man’s ponytail. There’s nothing very feminine about this odd-looking woman whose appearance puts me in mind of Ernest P. Worrell.

As the book concludes with her in the sleigh with Santa, the thought crosses my mind that perhaps in the skewered thoughts of Colandro and Lee, this is supposed to be Mrs. Claus. I’m more inclined, however, to think of her as simply a trusted friend of Santa. Maybe somebody well-intentioned but with a few screws loose who has been given this task just for the sake of her own self-esteem, not because it makes Santa’s job any easier.

I can remember laughing over the original song when I was little, so I suspect that this book might get some of the same giggles. And at least it’s less morbid. But I have no desire to celebrate this woman’s weird eating habits, and I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else do so either.