Snow White’s Mom was in the One Percent

This is the story of how Snow White came to be…

Once upon a time as a Queen sits sewing at her window, she pricks her finger on her needle and three drops of blood fall on the snow that had fallen on her ebony window frame. As she looks at the blood on the snow, she says to herself, “Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony”. Soon after that, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name her Princess Snow White. As soon as the child is born, the queen dies.

So Snow White’s mom was sewing by an open window in winter? I have always thought this was a little strange. When there is snow on the ground generally it’s pretty cold. You don’t have to be from Florida to know that it’s cold when it snows. Sure you people from Canada and Maine can say, “Well, it’s only thirty below, I think I’m going to have to put my winter clothes away,” but seriously, quit trying to fool everyone else. When snow is around, it’s cold.

This is my artwork; I like fairy tales. It’s called The Foretelling of Snow White. I painted this scene because that was a part of the story that really stuck out to me. Snow White’s mom had to have been crazy. When it’s cold enough to snow, all my windows are closed, I’m wearing a bunch of clothes, and the space heater is on full blast. I don’t sit by an open window.

Ok so maybe I’m being too hard on Snow White’s mom. Maybe she was from Norway or something. In Norway, 10 degrees Farenheit is probably like seventy degrees to people from Florida. Maybe there was a heat wave of ten degrees so Snow White’s mom was like, “Screw all this confinement business, I’m opening a window. Ah, it’s ten degrees outside it feels great! If I wasn’t so pregnant I would be outside in a bathing suit trying to catch some rays.”

Confinement, by the way, was something pregnant women used to do back in the day, especially when their stomachs started to poke out. There were also a ton of weird superstitions about what a woman should and should not do while she was pregnant.

I just had to put blades of grass poking through the snow in my painting because I could in no way rationalize a woman sitting by an open window with snow on it. Of course, she could have actually been a bit off-balance. Maybe she did things like turn the heat on in the summer and turn the AC on during the winter. Maybe she liked pickles and ice cream. I don’t know. Maybe, she even put french fries in her chocolate frosty. That’s weird people.

Snow White’s mother doesn’t really play a huge part in the story of Snow White. We meet her for the prophecy about Snow White, but that’s it. Snow White is born, then the mother dies, and then we skip a whole bunch of stuff until Snow White is old enough to be the fairest in the land.

Do you ever just wonder about the side characters in our stories? Some of them are important to our main character, but what inspires them and what happens to them? Do you ever wonder what Snow White’s mom was sewing? Maybe she was sewing baby clothes. Maybe she was fixing a tear in a dress. Maybe she was making some sexy lingerie. I went off of a version calling for Snow White’s mother to be embroidering, but she could have always been making a nightie.

For the matter, what the heck is ebony?

Ebony is a dense black wood, most commonly yielded by several species in the genus Diospyros, but ebony may also refer to other heavy, black (or dark-colored) woods from unrelated species.

This is what ebony is. So basically Snow White’s mother is loaded with cash. This stuff didn’t grow in Europe. It had to be imported from Asia. If you had something imported from Asia back in the day, you had money. It’s not like today when everything made in China is bad. On a side note, lots of things for sell in Japan are made in China.

Knowing this, maybe we could look at Snow White’s mother as your average celebrity or..*gasp*..the so called one percent. Celebrities have lots of money and do some odd things. I recently read an article about some celebrity or another saying that she got up at three in the morning to do two hours of yoga. Normal people don’t do things like that. When you’re poor and you do things like that you’re crazy, but when you’re rich, you’re eccentric; you’re also apparently the one percent. So Snow White’s mother was eccentric. She was the kind of woman who blew money on making the sills of her windows out of ebony and sewed by an open window in the middle of winter. This is just like when Michael Jackson put a roller coaster in his backyard. Ok, it’s nothing like that.

She also had unreasonable expectations of beauty. She wanted her daughter to have skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony, and lips as red as blood. First of all, if your skin is as white as snow, you’re dead. Also due to things like genetics, you’re probably not going to end up with hair as black as ebony if your skin is “as white as snow.” Usually darker hair comes with darker skin tones. It doesn’t always happen that way, but usually it does. Also, most people’s lips are not red. They’re usually various shades of pink. The only way you get the red look is from lipstick, which I hate. You also have to have money to buy it.

I have another note on the “skin as white as snow” thing. Back in the day, to have darker skin meant you worked in the fields where the sun beat down on you. Nobody cared about genetics. Having lighter skin was a sign of wealth. It meant you didn’t have to work in the fields and you had money to buy a bunch of parasols accessorizing all your outfits.

Yes, Snow White’s mother was in the one percent and not the ninety-nine.