Pupperville's Roots

     I grew up in Brainerd, MN and it was there that the seeds that eventually became Pupperville Ponderings were planted.

     It all started one year – I'm not sure which one – when the minister from a Church of Christ in a neighboring town gave the Church of Christ where I attended a set of puppets and some books of skits with instructions on how to make the puppets.

     The original set of puppets that were given to the church included two boys named Harold and Barney (one was dark skinned), two girls named Stella and Bernadette, a set of grandparents named Grandpa Grey and Grandma Grey (They were gray), an alligator,a worm, an elephant and a dog.

     While in Brainerd, I used the puppets from time to time with both the supplied skits and a few skits of my own that I had written. While I'm not sure what ever happened to those original puppets or the skits I had written, the idea of puppets stayed with me even though I moved away and got married. Eventually I decided it was time to remake six of the puppets.

     As I remade the puppets, I kept the original names but I made Harold and Stella a brother and sister and gave them the last name Peterson. I made Barney, who was dark skinned, to be Harold's best friend and gave him the last name of Lee while Bernadette took on the last name of Henderson and became Stella's best friend. The grandparents, known as Grandpa and Grandma Grey, became Harold's and Stella's grandparents through their mom's side and received the names Robert and Helen.

     With these six puppets I started writing puppet skits with lessons to be used during Sunday School in church. Eventually I decided to add to my collection and added a set of parents for Harold and Stella along with a set of twins, a minister and his wife, an orphan boy, a farmer and his daughter, and a character with an orange mo-hawk named Joel, which I gave away. Several more puppets were eventually started but never finished.

     Over the years I wrote more and more skits eventually using the skits to lead into Sunday School lessons. I had lots of fun letting my imagination go as I wrote the skits and over time each of the puppets developed their own characteristics. But change came, the writing came to close and the puppets went into storage but they weren't forgotten. From time to time they were thought about and uses for them were bounced around in my mind. In time I pulled them out of storage and started to reuse the stories and lessons with my own kids.

     In 2008 I was entertaining some kids around a campfire by retelling the puppet skits in more of a story format. The kids were loving it and one of the mothers suggested putting my skits on the blog I had started to be read by all. After giving it some thought I started converting my skits into stories and posting them on blog. I kept that up for about a year and than kind of quit. But the idea didn't go away.

     I wanted to try and do more with the stories, I wanted to make them more of a learning experience or devotional and towards the end of 2010 the ideas for Pupperville Ponderings came together. I took the stories I had already published and added a devotional type lesson to them to give the reader something to ponder and in 2011 Pupperville Ponderings became a reality.

     Since that time I have added even more puppets and now have 33 puppets in my collection and I'm continuing to enjoy converting my original skits into story format and writing new stories and God only knows where things will go. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as I have.