Cousin Froid tried visiting Dr M’s Tree house to read a Dutch fairy tale to the kiddies a couple of weeks ago. For various reasons he failed to get all the way inside so his voice sounded as hollow and disembodied as a robot’s when he told the legend of the first Klompen (or wooden shoes) from outside. Cousin Ron said it was hard to understand all the words that way.
Dr M invited him back to tell the story again. This time, on only the third incantation he tried, the tree house materialized and opened its door for Froid. Once inside he found Dr M, Nana Lou, Cousin Ron, and the children waiting to hear how the first wooden shoes happened to be crafted. Yes, of course it was fairies who did it, but the story starts long before that. Here’s Cousin Froid, AKA Jim Stauffer, reading from The World of Tales:
Note: There has been some confusion about Cousin Froid’s name since he introduced himself to the Bergeron family last year. Although the spelling is French, Froid is an immigrant Anglo-Canadian who learned French from bilingual cereal boxes as a teen. While he suspects that all letters after the first consonant may be silent in Québécois French, Cousin Froid and his Anglo family persist in pronouncing his name “Freud” because that’s just how they see it.
Froid is inordinately proud of his distant German ancestry and privately entertains politically incorrect views about other languages (i.e. the French are Germans trying to speak Latin, and the Dutch Language is a corrupted form of die Deutsche Sprache) – hence his inability to form the Dutch words in the story properly.
The Burgeron Family 