Popcorn, chocolate, and candy.  Hansel and Gretel were attracted to a house in the forest made of all these treats, and made it inside where they found a witch who pounced on them and locked them in cages with the intention of turning them into slaves, and then, when she got bored of them, she would make them into sweets.

This story is about temptation and the result of subcumbing  to it.  The characters are children, who perhaps, if they existed in the real world, would not necessarily know what temptation is.  They are attracted to things that are sweet, and think that everything that looks like a candy color or the colors of the playset at the playground, are the most fun and the best colors in the world.  They would not know that there are “fifty shades of grey.”  Or, coming from an artist’s point of view, that there are as many ways to create grey as there are tubes of colors being sold at the store.

So, are the children themselves to blame, when they go towards the things that make them happy?  Would they be able to see the candy house in the forest and know that, inside, lurks evil of the type that changes lives forever?  Children only see as much as is shown to them.  And I do not doubt the reality of Hansel and Gretel’s story.  Candy is sweet, nice, and it seems, always available.  These are not character traits of something that can kill you.

It is the witch, who only wants to keep building her house, that is the criminal.  She has spent time creating the situation.  She has lured children, her prime victim, to a desolate place in the forest.  She enslaves them, possibly making them do the house work (in the house she is building), and then when they are exhausted, she makes them into sweets to hang on the walls of the house, to decorate it, and to declare achievements and claim.

The problem is that there is a prey and there is a hunter.  Both these parties have very little possibility to live out their lives, unless they work on it.  The hunter, like the witch, wants the things he or she has seen in dreams and in places where he or she cannot go.  So, living in the forest, the easiest thing is to create that surprise in the forest–a place of rest, interest, and seemingly endless happiness.

What are these things?  Are they items of greed?  Or are they birthstones, yet to be made into something that life can appreciate?  Why have the hunt inside a forest?  There is no reason for any of it….  Do the witch, or the children, deserve to live the lives they live?

Are these reasons enough?  Or do we have to keep trying until we get the issue, the reasons, and the methods right?  How much time, how much money, and what will be required to justify all of this?  Who on earth would want to risk their lives, or even risk dying, just to achieve a questionable future, as there is no absolute promise of a wonderful future.