Now I want you to do your best to picture a scene that unfolded before my very eyes several nights ago. My family and I are traveling across America on our return journey to Texas. We are quite tired after a long day’s driving. We snugly cram into our hotel room. Our children sleep on the floor or in beds (based on their age and size). I go to snuggle for a few minutes, talk to, and pray over my little girls when I suddenly notice something very odd. My six-year-old daughter Jubilee is lying down on her makeshift bed on the floor, her nose is scrunched up. She is shaking her head and looking at the ceiling with great intensity.

“Jubilee darling,” says I. “What’s troubling you?”

She looks at me with sustained intensity and replies:

“Nellie Oleson is a wicked, sinful girl.”

“Do you mean that Nellie Oleson who is a friend of Laura on Little House of the Prairie?” says I.

“Oh Daddy, she is not a friend to Laura,” Jubilee declares, “She is a wicked, sinful little girl. Do you know what she did to Laura?”

I asked her to tell me, and she proceeded to give me blow-by-blow examples of various episodes. Apparently, about a dozen episodes into the season, my three daughters had gotten together and decided that Nellie Oleson was surely the naughtiest little girl who had ever been born. After all, who could be naughtier than Nellie Oleson?

At this point, I noticed two other figures in nightgowns sneaking their way over to the cranny where Jubilee and I were having our dialog.

Faith joins the conversation: “Nellie Oleson is a wicked little girl. She deserves twelve spankings, maybe even a million googleplex spankings” (please don’t think my little Faith is a sadist, this is just her way of translating what she hears from her Daddy’s talk on biblical mathematics into her four-year-old vision of a remedy for an undisciplined child).

“She gets to wear all the fancy dresses and have the fancy rings in her hair, and then she makes fun of poor girls like Laura,” Faith said.

“And her momma is a mean woman too,” chimes in Liberty. “I think Mrs. Oleson is like Jezebel because she won’t listen to her husband, Daddy.”

“She’s bossy,” says Faith.

“Just like Nellie,” says Jubilee.

“I like her daddy,” said Liberty, “But he doesn’t really lead his family.”

Right about now, I am wondering if the Little House on the Prairie series should be on the “how to raise a discerning child” suggested curriculum list.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember being equally outraged by Nellie when I was a young teenager. (Though I think at the time my solution for her bad attitude was a little less charitable and restrained than my daughters’. If I remember correctly, it had something to do with a pair of scissors and her golden locks, a pond of mud and her pretty dresses, and a good swift kick in the tuchus.)

And so it is, and so it ever shall be. Or, for at least as long as our children and grandchildren and perhaps great grandchildren journey back in time to the town of Walnut Grove and the world of a little girl named Laura Ingalls, that Nellie Oleson is and shall remain the quintessential example of a spoiled brat and the personification to our little ones of what it means to grow up without a strong father and the regular application of the rod to one’s posterior.