The Christmas Pickle. I learned about this Christmas tradition for the first time from one of my friends. To quote her explanation, “Every Christmas we use the same pickle ornament, usually my dad hides it in the tree, and whoever finds it on Christmas day gets to open a present first.” It’s a fun tradition that she has been doing ever since she was a little girl. She says that it didn’t start until her sister was at their neighbor’s for a Christmas party and took one of the ornaments, a pickle. It was later explained to her family by the same neighbors of the tradition and they have done it ever since. The tradition itself apparently comes from a story of a German-American prisoner who was taken prisoner during the Civil War. Starving, he begged a guard to give him one last pickle before he died. The pity pickle gave him the mental and physical strength to live on. This story is much harsher than its Christmas counterpart but nonetheless displays a sense of fortune and luck through a pickle.
Category Archives: Game
“Mary’s Mother” Riddle
Text:
Riddle: “Mary’s mother has five children. Her first four children’s names are April, May, June, and July. What is the fifth child’s name?”
Answer: “Mary”
Context:
H is currently a student at USC. She originally heard this riddle from someone at her elementary school in San Diego, California, where the students would tell it amongst each other. After sharing the riddle, H remarked that the important part of the joke seemed to be the “gotcha” twist. They also noted that the names of the four other children didn’t seem to matter as much as there being a pattern to them that might help trick the riddle’s recipient.
Analysis:
H already pointed out many interesting points of analysis about this riddle. Like H, I find it significant that the point of the riddle seems to be to fool the riddle recipient into forgetting the beginning of the riddle, leading them to give an incorrect answer that would seem logical to the sequence of names. I personally think that the desire to trick someone using this riddle ties in closely with the elementary setting in which H originally heard it. As has been discussed, much of children’s folklore stems from trying to establish a sense of authority in a world in which children have very little. By knowing the answer to this riddle, children may temporarily hold authority over a peer or adult who doesn’t. It is also worth noting that knowing the riddle or a similarly structured one creates an in-group; those children who have been tricked by the riddle can then go on to trick others. By learning the structure of the riddle, the recipient also learns to pay closer attention and look for important details in future riddles or logic puzzles.
Paper Airplane
Text:
How to fold a paper airplane, supplied by CM:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xLNDt71f5DRvRmpA5kBTc1iRDXzPeEse/view?usp=sharing
Context:
CM is a male college student at USC. His relationship to the paper airplane is that he learned how to fold one when he was an elementary school, around second or third grade, from a fellow classmate. He reports that paper airplanes were used typically among boys in competitive games to see who could design a paper airplane that could travel the furthest. These types of games were usually played during the day at school, either during class or at recess.
Analysis:
This folk object, as an item of children’s folklore, serves as an emblem of social status, one constructed entirely within the social dynamic of school children, particularly of young boys. The instructions to create a paper airplane are not considered a part of most schools’ curriculum, meaning that most children are not creating these folk objects out of a directive from an authority. To be known as the boy who can construct the best paper airplane is to having a higher standing among your classmates. The paper airplane and the memory of how to make it is a relic of early competitiveness within the hierarchy of childhood.
Pelican Soup
Text:
“Alright, here’s the riddle. A guy walks into a restaurant and asks for Pelican Soup and they serve it to him. And then, after he drinks the soup, he walks out of the restaurant and kills himself. Why did he kill himself?”
[For around the next twenty minutes there is a back and forth conversation between me and the riddle teller, where I ask questions about the given scenario and the riddler responds with yes/no and guiding comments. The conversation is too long to record completely in this post, but the general trend of the questions went from asking about the quality of the pelican soup, asking about the man’s family, discovering the man’s wife is dead, and uncovering the circumstances surrounding her death. The text is recorded from the end of the discussion.]
Me: “So the spouse’s body parts are not in the pelican soup.”
Teller: “Not in the one that he’s drinking at the restaurant.”
Me: “Oh! So did they make pelican soup out of her? …She’s not a pelican.”
Teller: “Um… You’re like on fire right now but you’re still not exactly there. Why did they make pelican soup out of her?”
Me: “Cause they were hungry.”
Teller: “Why were they hungry?”
Me: “Cause they were stranded on an island.”
Teller: “So why did the man kill himself?”
Me: “I’m sure that it would be bad to eat your spouse. I don’t think it would be very enjoyable, and to eat pelican soup and be like ‘hm, this pelican soup tastes different from the one that I had before – oh it was human flesh…’”
Teller: “Ok, so just for the sake of understanding, could you phrase what the story was then.”
Me: “I think they got stranded on the island, they did something with the spouse and she fucking died, I don’t know exactly… and then the friend was like ‘well I guess we’re going to have to cook her!’ and they didn’t tell the dude, and then they ate ‘pelican soup.’ And then he went back and was like “I’m so sad about my wife, this pelican soup tastes different.”
Teller: You got it! Let’s go.
Context:
I collected this riddle/game in a group call where this riddle was performed on me. The person telling the riddle had originally learned of it online from a video, but also had heard it from his friends throughout the years. Other members of the call also noted that they had heard the riddle from various different settings while growing up, such as summer camps, from friends at school, etc.. During this call of around 6 people, I was the only one who had not known of the riddle beforehand, and thus was the only one attempting to find the solution. Typically, as both the teller and other members of the group informed me, the riddle would be performed on a group of people who would collectively try to solve the riddle together.
Analysis:
The Pelican Soup problem provides very little information in the initialization itself, and thus requires the solver to continuously interact and question the teller and form a solution based on the information gained in this process. In this way, “Pelican Soup” acts closer to a logic puzzle or game than an actual riddle, with the main source of amusement coming from its dynamic interactivity between teller and solver. While there was only one solver in this particular performance of the puzzle, the typically communal context that this problem is given in also adds an additional level of interaction amongst the various solvers as well, as they each contribute a variety of questions to reach the truth. The Pelican Soup Problem, in this way, greatly resembles “20 Questions” – a game where solvers must identify a specific item that a teller is thinking of within twenty questions – though “Pelican Soup” possesses a more complex solution that warrants an unlimited number of questions.
An additional level of entertainment comes from the morbidity of the scenario itself, based around an event of suicide and cannibalization. Given that this particular instance of the problem was learned in childhood and through programs like summer camps, I would argue that the level of morbidity in the puzzle acts as a sort of test of adulthood for those still in their youth – the better that they are able solve the puzzle and comprehend its darkness, the greater they are prepared for the more serious and severe “adult world.”
Urban Legend- Herobrine in Minecraft
Story:
Minecraft players have talked about this figure Herobrine, who basically looks like the character Steve but without eyeballs, for a few years. You summon Herobrine by making an altar our of gold, nether, and torches. It’s less common to see Herobrine himself – although some players have claimed to – but you can tell he’s been in an area in a number of ways. For example, the trees might have no leaves, you might see a random 2×2 tunnel, something you built could be on fire, he might put up signs with threatening messages … those are a few things that players have linked to him. Some people claim to have seen him even without spawning him using the altar; there are some blurry screenshots circulating online as proof, but it’s been debated whether those are edited or not. It’s most likely that if he’s real, he’s a glitch, based on the way he acts. But some people have started a rumor that Herobrine is the dead brother of Notch [the founder of Minecraft].
Context:
The informant, BN, is my classmate at USC. He is an avid Minecraft player, and came across this legend through posts on Reddit and YouTube related to the game.
Analysis:
Personally, I think Herobrine is real. Although I’ve never seen the ominous character himself, I have tried to spawn him in using the gold/nether altar – and soon thereafter I saw leafless trees, as well as a sign in front of my house in the game, saying “You will burn.”
The development and spread of the Herobrine legend shows the nature of the Minecraft community. The square-based universe of Minecraft is one adjacent to our real world, so it has its own folklore and urban legends. Players’ thoughts on whether Herobrine is real or not stem from their personal experiences with the game, as well as the YouTube and Twitch content they consume of it. This is similar to how many people’s belief in ghosts comes from their own perceived encounters with one, or convincing video content that someone else has interacted with/seen one. Plus, most Minecraft players belong to Gen Z and grew up with the game. This demographic was in their early teens when the Herobrine legend first originated and gained traction. This young age group is significantly more likely to believe a story about the paranormal, allowing the legend to take off and maintain relevance.