Bedtime Stories

This day, I found out that only less than 10 out of  around 300 first year students I am handling had experienced Bedtime Story Telling when they were younger. Some even commented that such an activity is only for the rich. I was amazed.

I belong to a very poor family yet I grew up with lots of stories from older folks particularly my mother, aunts and grandmother. I really enjoyed those bedtime story sessions when I was still a child.

My mother whose highest educational attainment was only grade five, used to tell stories about her World War II experiences and the royal family of England and some popular personalities of other countries.  I remember her telling stories about the Kennedy family, Queen Elizabeth and especially, Princess Diana. 

My aunt shared countless encounters with both seen and unseen special creatures and ghosts. I was scared nevertheless; I always looked forward to hearing more.

My lola, in those very rare nights we spent together before bedtime, told me fable and parable stories.

Hey, I just realized, I had a balance doze of bedtime stories before.

I never thought about those bedtime stories when I became a mother and started retelling my childhood bedtime stories to my two daughters myself.  Unlike my older folks, I usually had visual aids later when I resorted to children literature books because my memory bank ran out of more stories. Other children love to be told the stories over and over again. But my daughters demanded new stories every night. And we had average of 3 stories every night.  There were times, that I would recycle stories by changing characters or location, etc.

I believe it was those bedtime story telling sessions that instilled the love of books in them even at young age.  We lived in the province then and every time, we took vacation to Manila, one destination they cannot afford to miss was going to National Book Store, Cubao.

Now that they are in their teens, I am happy that they still appreciate stories from the books although they have changed their taste.  From Fairytale books, they are now reading Vampire/Twilight books.  They even do their best to save from their school allowance just so they can buy the books they wanted.

Someday, I hope they will realize that they have benefited from Bed Time Story Telling after all.