Tag Archives: children’s folklore

Bloody Mary

Context: The popular legend was spun off into an outdoors urban legend and corresponding children’s game in New York.

A.F.: For us, it [Bloody Mary] was like a, we had two ways. It was a sleepover game. We had a flashlight at someone’s house, but the main way that we would do it, so I went to elementary school in a relatively, even though it’s suburban, it’s still an isolated area, so there were like paths, that went to like houses or roads. So there was this path that led from like our, because we had like a vaguely biggish field, that went from the path to a house on my road. Which again, we thought it was like the Bloody Mary path, and if you wandered too far then Bloody Mary would come and get you.
P.Z. : Okay, so it was outdoors?
A.F.: Um, yeah, ours was actually outdoors. Yes.

Thoughts: This was a much different version than the one I am familiar with. I’m not sure if this was primarily an East-Coast variation or specific to the respondent’s school. But usually, there were not these specific, wooded, secluded paths that made this version possible.

Cheese Touch

Context: The Cheese Touch game was popularized shortly after the publishing of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and corresponding movies. The Bone Touch was one group’s variation of this popular game, instead altered to fit a rural ranch setting, replacing the forbidden cheese with a cow hide being displayed as decor.

A.F. : Okay. The Cheese Touch is, so, um, typically if someone touched cheese in elementary school they would have the Cheese Touch and the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else.
P.Z. : Yeah, I know that we played that at my elementary school, but we had also, because we were in rural San Diego, we went to a ranch and there was a cow hide, and it still had a bone attached to it, so that started the Bone Touch, but yeah, the Cheese Touch.
A.F. : Yeah
P.Z. : That was really popular, what, late two-thousands? Early two-thousands?
A.F. : Late two-thousands, early twenty-tens.

Thoughts: I had read the books that this game was based on, so the game made perfect sense to me when it began gaining popularity. This seemed to be extremely popular for a number of years, and seemed just a variation on the ‘cooties’ game that children often also play.

The “S”

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: 4/9/22
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant is a 20 year old boy who grew up in California.

G: So the concept is to just draw a cool s with the six lines and the connectors so it kind of looks 3D. This one is pretty common, we all learned it in school from our friends at some point. I think I learned it when I was 8. You can just put it anywhere, it’s funny if you put it on a homework assignment or something to kind of mess with a teacher. You see it in graffiti a lot too.

My Thoughts: I learned this when I was about the same age and going to school in Colorado. I’m not sure how long its been around, but I think it’s something that every kid learns how to do and then doodles it all over their school notes. I think I learned it from older kids, so it felt almost like an initiation.

Pombinha Branca

Nationality: Brazilian
Age: 55
Occupation: Stay at Home
Residence: Brazil
Performance Date: 2022
Primary Language: Portuguese
Language: Spanish

S. is a 55-year-old female Brazilian immigrant from Sao Paolo and the rural vineyard areas of Brazil. She has lived in the U.S. for about seven years. She says this song was popular around the rural areas and her mother sang it around the house as she cleaned.

This was near an area in San Antonio with a large Brazilian population around all the Brazilian steakhouses. We were picking her and her family up from their work.

Pombinha branca, que está fazendo?
Lavando roupa pro casamento
Vou me lavar, vou me trocar
Vou na janela pra namorar
Passou um moço, de terno branco
Chapéu de lado, meu namorado
Mandei entrar
Mandei sentar
Cuspiu no chão
Limpa aí seu porcalhão!

/

Little White dove, what are you doing?

Washing laundry for the wedding.

I’m going to wash up, I’m going to get changed,

I’m going to the window to flirt.

 A young man in a white suit,

 Hat tilted to the side, my sweetheart,

 I had him come in,

 I had him sit down He spat on the floor.

 Clean up your filth there,

Have better manners.

Pombinha Blanca is a folk song or traditional lullaby sung in a playful key that quickly turns furious both in tempo and key after the “spitting on the floor.” S. mentioned the lullaby reinforced some funny gender norms, encouraging harmony, but presenting the consequences of masculinity spilling over into sloppiness. In this entry, the folk song intended for children indirectly teaches gender norms just as Oring cites in his chapter, Children’s folklore in Folk Groups and Folk Genres. After establishing the social norms of feminine presentations and its rituals.

Secrets of the Lanyard

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 19th, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: N/A

Main Piece:

Informant: I know how to start a lanyard– I was the girl everyone went to.

Collector (Me): Could you explain how to start a lanyard?

Informant: Okay. So it’s so simple you just get the two pieces of string and you lay them in like, a cross, like, so like the middles intersect, and then you more or less just do the normal lanyard pattern, like over the little cross where they intersect. And then when you pull it you’ve started the lanyard and you can just keep going. 

Collector: That’s so inspirational. 

Informant: (laughing) I was a hero at my summer camp.

Background: 

My informant is one of my friends, a sophomore at USC. She went to summer camps when she was a child, and a popular craft activity there would be making box stitch lanyards out of colorful plastic strings. Usually most girls at the camp would know how to weave the strings together into a lanyard, but the difficult part was knowing how to start it. Another girl would be the one to start it. My informant, however, did know how to begin a lanyard, and as a result she was the one that other girls went to when they needed help working on lanyards at summer camp, and in the eyes of her peers, was seen as higher status.

Context: 

This piece came up when my informant, another participant, and I were talking about the various activities we used to do during summer camps. We discussed jump rope games and songs, then moved onto crafts— specifically lanyards, and if anyone knew how they were started in the first place.

My thoughts: 

I liked this piece because it reminded me of my own memories of summer camp when I was a child and also struggled to start lanyards. I remember having to find someone who knew how to start them, but what struck me as I listened to my informant was that while I knew of people who could start lanyards, the instructions were always kept secret. In fact, the notion of secrets plays a significant role in children’s folklore. For children, who should be seen as their own cultural group (a repressed minority) when being studied, secrets are akin to obtaining status and power. Secrets solidify groups within the larger peer group of children, and withholding knowledge from others can elevate a child’s status in the hierarchy. This is seen through what my informant told me: by knowing how to start a lanyard, she was viewed with high esteem by the other girls at summer camp. She also mentioned the same status applied if you knew how to do a variation of the lanyard pattern, meaning that the skills of making lanyards were also valued in the peer group.