It must have been some weeks ago when the Dutch Meteorological institute predicted a meteor shower in the night sky. I had never seen a falling star in my entire life; somehow I have always missed them. When someone pointed for me to look, "Up there!" I was always too late, or a bug would fly into my eye, or I looked in the wrong direction. I never seemed to have much luck with it, until that night...

A friend of mine heard about the meteor shower on the news and insisted that we should go to the country to see it for ourselves. I was, at first not very enthusiastic about his plan, as it also happened to be one of the coldest nights we had had in years. I preferred to stay inside with a cup of hot chocolate-milk and some good books, but somehow his enthusiasm captured me and so we went after all, into the freezing night.

We walked for half an hour through the cold and dark night having a hard time staying upright. The normally muddy paths were frozen and thus with every step we took we kept slipping. Eventually we found a nice spot and started looking for stars, but we saw none... Of course, I was not all that surprised and I explained to my friend that this always happened to me. I was "cursed" and that "curse" was so strong that it could even prevent a meteor shower from falling when I was watching.

After a while I turned around and suggested we should go home. I started walking back but then I heard my friend say, "Look there is one!" Before anyone starts asking, yes, I missed it again and not just that one, I missed the following three falling stars as well!

But then something magical happened... the "curse" was made undone. I looked up, wondering if I would ever see a falling star. I even send out a little prayer, which I thought was quite silly of me because if there was a God at all he certainly had more important things to do then to grant me my wish to see a falling star. But apparently God wasn't very busy that night, because soon after I saw my first falling star, followed by a second and a third one in a few moments. I remember being as happy as a kid in a candy store.

My friend reminded me to make a wish with every falling star I had seen and not to tell anyone else or else the wish would not come true. Thus that was what I did. On our way home I wondered how many stars would have fallen from the sky during all these years. How many people would have looked up at the sky and spotted them, how many wishes were whispered during all those nights and how many of them really did come true? Who will know, if not the stars themselves.

It was a couple of days later when my eye fell on a small passage of a book I was reading at the time, The Bathhouse at Midnight, written by W.F. Ryan. It told of a curious superstition in Russia, where people in the past believed that falling stars were really demons falling from the sky. These demons were supposed to have intercourse with women and this would then leave them emaciated. To prevent this, women would say: 'Amen, Amen, rassyp'sia!' ('Amen, Amen, disperse!')

It was then that I started to wonder how many tales and superstitions were connected with falling stars. I myself had made a wish while seeing a falling star, and reading this passage made me convinced that many more tales were out there, and I was right.

 Thinking it would be nice sharing these discoveries with you I made a small list of those I came across:

- In England people say that when you see a shooting star a child will be born in the near future.

- Another beautiful belief was that a star would appear in the sky when a child was born and that this star would fall when this person died.

- Frogs eggs were believed, in the Netherlands (and maybe also elsewhere) to be the remains of falling stars once they had crashed to the earth.

- Russian girls predicted from which village their future husband would come by the direction the star would fall.

- In China people believed that shooting stars were glimpses of the dragons, which inhabited the sky.

- It was believed that shooting stars were really messages from the Gods above, from which one could predict what the future would bring.

- A Turkish Folk belief says that all the saints come together when there is a shooting star.

- If lovers in Japan see a shooting star, they take it as an ill omen for their relationship.

And at last, in America it is a well-known superstition among schoolchildren that if you say: 'money, money, money' when you see a shooting star before it vanishes, you will receive lots of money in the near future.

Of course many more beliefs and tales are out there, too many to mention here in this column. But maybe this handful of folk beliefs will make you see things differently the next time you see a shooting star. After all, magic is not much more then seeing things in a different light. Tales alone can make the most ordinary thing look like a miracle. So if you want more magic in your life, read more of these wonderful tales. Believe me, they are everywhere...

By Isabella Baudelaire

Following the Yellow Brick Road

Isabella is a 23 year old artist / illustrator who specializes in the wonderful and amazing.

She has spent most of her life in the imaginary worlds. Everything she encountered on her trips to those worlds she has put down on paper, using nothing more then her pencil and a bottle of Indian ink.

Her work is inspired by folklore, myths, legends, superstition, folk songs and of course her own journeys and imagination.

Someone I greatly admire words my personal feeling about the Magical world best: Desiderius Erasmus -

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other."

Isabella has been a member of Enchanted Folk since May 2008

members.enchantedfolk.com/isabellasart