“Once Upon a Time.” You know what that means. I know what that means. Most people understand the phrase before they turn six. We have “fairy tales”, knowing that not all of them involve fairies per se, but realizing by their very names that they are fantastical and wholly unreal. So why do we tell these stories; why are millions of children raised on Disney movies and books about talking animals? I don’t know, obviously, having never raised children or really asked this question before, but it probably says a ton about the nature and importance of belief.

So according to Wikipedia – the information source we all know and love to pretend we don’t use for everything – “once upon a time” is ‘a stock phrase used to open the telling of a story in the English language,’ having been around since at least the year 1380 AD. It’s old. It sticks with us. It begins stories and serves as inspiration. And when we hear “once upon a time”, we know that the narrative to come is mostly filler until we find out that the heroine and her beloved “lived happily ever after.” I think that’s pretty cool. Because things like this let you imagine what happens in between the predictable beginning and prescribed end, in that space in which anything can and will happen. Remember, it’s a fairy tale, so literally anything is possible. Of course, it has to follow some guidelines, so it seems: keep it PG-13 (though the Grimm Brothers’ original tales were really quite gory and a little disturbing, they still never veered into obscenity); make sure it ends with some incarnation of true love. Have the sidekicks perform heroically just as the hero faces obstacles, and some trees or animals will likely need to talk. Noble language and beautiful clothing are a must. But these aside, the beauty of this flexibility is this: it doesn’t really matter what happens in between those two phrases.

It’s also amazing, to me at least, how fairy tales repeat themselves. In my (admittedly somewhat recent) time as a preschool student, my favorite book was a Persian telling of the Cinderella story. But whichever school I attended also offered not only the American/English version, but also a Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and African version of the same story. They were all essentially the same. I just liked the color of the lamp that the Persian princess possessed, so that was likely the defining factor in choosing this one iteration over any other. They all started with “once upon a time” and ended with “happily ever after,” as did every other fairy tale in my school’s library.

And the message stuck – how else would I care or remember enough to write about it now, otherwise? I can’t speak for the opposite gender, but I know that even as a tomboyish seven-year-old I still loved the magic of putting Sleeping Beauty away until cobwebs grew over her face and of Rapunzel’s magic hair attracting her a mate. I wasn’t really allowed to watch much TV, so my exposure came from the written version of these – as many different versions as possible. I can’t tell you how many different picture books and young adult novels and even fantasy works for adults have come past my way, and if I could, the number wouldn’t be representative of the total in any way. I used to play dress-up with my best friends and sister (and even my brother, who I may or may not have convinced to dress up as Tinkerbelle one Halloween so that I could be Peter Pan) in an attempt to channel the magic that “once upon a time” encourages.

I just realized that I didn’t answer my own question at all. I still have no idea why we tell these stories. I don’t know a lot of things though, so that’s okay. The important thing is that they matter and that they’ve stuck around to continue to matter so that they can stick around, etc., and that they’re kind of fun to read and/or watch. They bring together something like a common cultural experience, so that we, as seven-year-old girls, can still bond by talking about which princess’s dress was the best color and other crucial topics as such. And also, so that we can all live happily ever after with picture books at our sides (sorry, AP Lit.)