Mansfield, Missouri, held its annual Little Laura/Little Farmer Boy contest this past weekend.
I asked my seven-year-old niece if she wanted to wear her prairie dress and participate in the contest. “No,” she answered without hesitation. “I want to be in a Mary contest.”
Did I mention my niece is blonde?
I find it somewhat amusing that almost 140 years ago, young Mary was flaunting her own golden locks and poor little Laura thought her brown hair dull and longed for the golden. Now little girls all want brown hair so they can be like Laura — and if they don’t have it, like my niece, they feel as if they’d be discriminated against in a Laura look-alike contest.
Now, mind you, I’m not sure if the judges cared about the hair color or not. But my niece… she cared. I said to her, “There’s not a Mary contest. It’s Laura or nothing.”
“Then I don’t want to be in it,” she decided. “Because I don’t want to dye my hair brown.”
Well, I wasn’t raised on the “Little House” books to let a little complication like that prevent my niece from doing something I knew she would enjoy. I thought of Ma’s green pumpkin pie that fooled Pa into thinking she’d found a way to make apple pie with no apples. I thought of her clever way to make a button lamp when the kerosene ran out. Ma Ingalls taught me well: you make do with what you have. You improvise.
So improvise I did. When I was a little girl, I was mesmerized by the long brown braids my grandmother kept in a little cardboard box in her desk. They had belonged to my mother when she was a little girl. When my grandmother decided to cut her hair, she braided it, and cut the braids off, and kept them. I loved playing with them, as a child. Putting them next to my own long brown braids and comparing the hair color. I loved that they were identical. If I put together her braids and mine, nobody could tell them apart.
My grandmother never gets rid of anything. I knew she still had those braids. She let me borrow them, and I pinned them to the inside of my niece’s sunbonnet.
I braided her own blonde hair and clipped it to the top of her head, then placed the sunbonnet wig on top of her hair. Voila! Little Laura!
She was so excited. She thought it was such a clever trick, and very cool to be wearing her Grandma’s braids. Until the night before the contest, that is.
“I don’t want to be in the contest anymore,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked in surprise. “You were so excited about it!”
“Because I don’t want to cheat,” she said, hanging her head down.
Instantly, I thought of poor Almanzo, winning the prize for his enormous pumpkin at the fair, and then his sudden guilt as he realized that feeding his pumpkin with milk might have been cheating.
My niece hasn’t yet read Farmer Boy, so I shared with her the story, including its happy outcome as Almanzo ‘fessed up and learned that what he had done was totally fair and no rules had been broken. I told her that the contest was not to see who already looks like Laura, but who can dress up the best to look like her. Her braids were part of her costume, and it wasn’t breaking any rules to wear them.
That cheered her right up, and she entered the contest the next morning with a guilt-free conscience.
Sometimes I wonder… could a situation ever arise where there is no Little House story at all that addresses it?
I’ve yet to find one. 
And no, she did not win the contest (and I felt sorry for the judges who had to choose between 25 or more little girls who all looked just like Laura!) but maybe she would have had the judges known she had the oldest hair. It just so happens that those braids were cut off in 1957… the same year Laura died.
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