The full text of The Red Dancing Shoes:
The little girl, Jalen, loves red shoes because of her vanity of beauty. She wears red shoes at her mother's funeral, wears red dancing shoes when her foster mother takes her to worship, and insists on wearing red dancing shoes when she goes to church despite her foster mother's objections. She was very proud when her foster mother bought her a pair of patent leather red dancing shoes just like the princesses.
One day, after a strange veteran pointed at her shoes, Jaron couldn't resist showing off her beautiful red shoes and tried to dance, but ended up dancing uncontrollably without any control at all, until the people around her took her shoes off. From then on those shoes were sealed away. But she still tries to wear them from time to time.
The foster mother was sick, lying in bed, needing her to take care of, but she still thought of the red dancing shoes in her head, and finally could not help but rummage out of the box, the red dancing shoes, and put them on to attend the ball. She was still dancing after the ball, her feet were out of control. She danced day and night and found that she could not stop. Skipping over fields, over forests, over graves, she heard the angel's curse on her, "Dance in your red shoes until you turn white and cold, until your body dries up and shrinks into a skeleton."
Jaren danced to the door of an executioner, and she begged him to cut off her feet. After cutting off her feet the executioner gave her a pair of wooden feet and crutches and taught her a hymn that death row inmates sing. Jalen used the wooden feet and crutches to complete her penance and seek inner peace.
But the severed feet still kept dancing. Jalen rushes back to her adoptive mother's home and finds that she has fallen gravely ill and died. After she came to her senses, she tried to go to church to confess, but the dancing feet blocked her way to church twice in a row. Eventually, as Jalen reads hymns with devotion at home, she sees the angel again, and after a long period of penance, the angel guides her on the path to heaven.
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"The Red Dancing Shoes" is a famous Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen's This story teaches us not to be vain and not to pay too much attention to these superficial material things, but to live with our feet on the ground and to find the meaning of our life.
Andersen explains that the story stems from an incident he experienced as a child. According to his account, a wealthy female customer gave his father a red silk scarf to make a pair of dancing slippers for her daughter. His father made them very carefully, using leather in addition to the scarf, but the customer said the finished shoes were garbage. She said his father had done nothing but ruin her silk scarf. "In that case," said his father, "I might as well ruin my leather too," and then his father cut up the shoes in front of the woman's customer.
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