Text:

“When you are sitting around a campfire and the smoke starts blowing you, you start saying ‘chubby bunny chubby bunny chubby bunny’ until the smoke moves. Saying ‘chubby bunny’ is supposed to make the smoke go away.”

Context:

QK is a 23-year-old American Recruiter who grew up in Minnesota. She told me this tradition that she did living in Minnesota when she young, and she was sitting by a fire and didn’t want to sit in the path of the smoke. 

Interpretation:

This is something I used to do growing up as well, and I remember sitting around a campfire, in direct smoke saying “chubby bunny” over and over again in hopes that the smoke would go away instead of just moving. I think this tradition is probably specific to places where it gets cold outside and you can’t just go away from the fire or else you will get too cold, so you have to sit by the fire, even if smoke is blowing in your face. It often seemed to work, as if the near rhyme had a magical effect on the smoke that got it to move. It’s a tradition I would even tell younger kids as I got older. I think we have a tendency to try to find ways to control things that are uncontrollable in nature. Even though saying “chubby bunny” can’t actually change the direction of the wind and move the smoke away from us, it is fun to try and when it does move, it seems like magic.