Those do all seem like reasonable directions, indeed.

I was coming at it more from the specific direction of having previously read a story that this sounds like it's a very direct retelling of -- namely, this one ("The Yellow Ribbon") and its variants. In particular, when I was checking online to see if the story I was remembering was in Grimm's (it isn't), I found that the other common standardish version of it, in this book, also has a green ribbon.