QotD: The children are waiting! Please tell them the story about the bald frog with the wig:

Listen, children. Frogs were not always the bald greenish or brownish things they are now. Once, long ago, they had silvery skin, from a dark lustrous gray all the way to a bright silver-white. They also had hair, and the hair grew not just from their heads, oh no! It grew in long waves from head and back, and from their legs as well. There was never hair so beautiful and fine, and the color—my! All the colors of the rainbow. When they hopped, their hair bounced in joyous curls behind them. When they swam, their hair would fan out about them, shimmering in the water.

One day a young princess, wandering alone in the royal gardens, spied a frog with the most beautiful long, satiny hair—golden as the coins her father had minted with his likeness upon them. She crept close, smiled, and whispered. “Dear froggy, would you like a kiss?”

The frog, whose name was Hrmm, stared at the princess. Why would she want to kiss him? The princess moved a step closer. “My nurse says if a princess kisses a frog, he’ll turn into a handsome prince.” Her nurse had said no such thing, of course, but she didn’t care. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You could have anything you wanted, and everyone would have to do your bidding.”

An older frog, naturally, would have hopped away from someone spouting such nonsense. Hrmm was just young enough to wonder if she might be telling the truth. That moment’s hesitation proved his downfall. With a sudden swoop, the princess had him by his long golden hair, and despite his urgent croaking, she ran from the garden into the castle, up some stairs, swinging him ferociously, so that he began to feel quite ill.

The worst was yet to come. When the princess got to her room, she grabbed a pair of scissors, and snippety-snip! Hrmm’s golden tresses fell to the floor. The princess locked him in an old birdcage. “I’m sure you’ll grow some more hair for me, won’t you, dear froggy. What do you want to live in an old pond for, anyway?”

The princess made Hrmm’s hair into a wonderful wig, and she wore it at the next ball. Everyone was stunned by her amazing curls, shining like 24 carat spun gold. She danced every dance, and the princes quarreled over who got to dance with her next. One even punched another in the nose.

It wasn’t long before no frog was safe. The ponds and streams were soon nothing but nets and traps and nooses. Everyone wanted froghair wigs, even the men, because they wore their hair long in those days. Of course, they preferred the less curly froghair. It was a terrible time for frogs. Sometimes they were simply shaved and released to lead a bare and embarrassing life. But sometimes they ended up in cages, like Hrmm, and sometimes they got their legs broken.

The frogs held a council and decided to visit the local witch. It cost a pretty penny, which is to say they had to scamper far and wide finding all the plants and spiderweb and magic rocks the witch had on her list. At last she cast her great spell.

Everything near the streams and ponds suddenly turned a silvery color, with streaks of red and blue, purple and green, very similar to waves of froghair. Camouflage, said the witch. Let them try and catch you now.

It was a bit harder finding frogs when all the plants and rocks and dirt and grass and even the water looked just like them. But soon people simply came stomping and smashing with oversized boots, checking underneath now and then to see if they’d squashed a frog. Camouflage was basically a disaster.

Luckily for the frogs, a wizard wandered through one day, took one look at the situation, frowned, and raised his wand. In one wild moment when the earth and sky seemed to change places, and then whirl crazily back to what everyone was accustomed to, the camouflage disappeared completely. So did the froghair, every bit of it. To top it off, the wizard changed the bald little frogs’ skin to rather dull colors, hoping no one would think to skin them. He knew, you see, that frogs were very important to the ecology of the entire planet.

The frogs were embarrassed for a while, but soon relaxed into the safety the wizard had provided by making them bald and green. Now and again some young idiot frog hears that nonsense about a princess kissing a frog and goes hopping off into trouble, but other than that, the only frogs who continued to have trouble were the ones in France. Somebody there had tasted their legs.