Tag Archives: children’s folklore

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. 

The Tooth Fairy

Nationality: American
Age: 53
Occupation: Attorney
Residence: Baltimore, MD
Performance Date: May 2, 2021
Primary Language: English

Main piece: Every tooth you got a note from the tooth fairy, who was a woman – a Ms. Tooth Fairy. And she had a wand and a costume. And there was a rate for it. One tooth was $1, molars were $5, and the last tooth was a big deal, like 20 bucks. The fairy is magic. She’s real. She sent me a letter. But, you know, my children loved those notes. One of them kept all of them.

Background:  My informant is a fifty-three year old woman from Los Angeles, California. She is the mother of three children, aged twenty, sixteen, and fourteen. Whenever one of them would lose a tooth, they would receive some money (rates stated above), and a letter from the tooth fairy inquiring after their general well-being, and complimenting how big they’ve grown. To this day, whenever her children ask about the tooth fairy (including her eldest for the purposes of a folklore project), she adamantly says “she” is real. 

Context: The tooth fairy is a common folk character. The Western variation of this folklore states that if a child loses their tooth and leaves it under a pillow, the tooth fairy will come, take the tooth, and bring them money. In the case of my informant’s children, a note would accompany the typical tradition, and my informant continues to tell her children of its existence, even if they are old enough now to no longer believe in her. 

My informant told this story when I brought up Santa Claus as an example of a character rooted in folklore. 

Analysis: The folklore of being given money by the tooth fairy comes from the fear of losing one’s teeth- an otherwise horrific and scary occurrence for any young child to deal with. By rewarding or giving the child a present in exchange for the lost tooth, they are able to take something that would otherwise be seen as strange and scary and make it seem exciting or something to look forward to. The notes as an accompaniment to the money made the experiences of the children of my informant more personal, and having a stock character that wrote to them and comforted them made that experience even easier to handle. Additionally, my informant’s refusal to deny the existence of the tooth fairy to this day has more to do with her perspective than that of the kids’, as having a tooth fairy is part of childhood, and as the children grow up, they no longer need her and stop believing in her. My informant’s insistence of her continued existence in reality is her way of connecting the character with the childhood innocence of her children, even now that they are mostly grown up.  (For another version, see Stuurman, May 18, 2020, “The Tooth Fairy”, USC Folklore Archives)

The Game

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 19, 2021
Primary Language: English

“The Game? Like “I lost the Game?” It sucks and it’s stupid. Basically, if you think about the Game, you lose the game, and you can’t win. But if someone loses the Game, they have to announce that they lost the Game and then everyone else around them hates them because they also lose the Game and it sucks.”

Thoughts: This is a fun bit of children’s folklore. Almost everyone I know has heard of The Game, so I did some digging online about the origins. According to Wikipedia, it probably originated in England or Australia, sometime during the 20th century. 

PS: If you’re reading this, you lost The Game.

Secret Summer Camp Chant

Leave a reply
Nationality: American
Age: 68
Occupation: Computer Consultant
Residence: Healdsburg, California
Performance Date: April 26. 2021
Primary Language: English

Background:

The informant’s mother used to say this phrase as a playful thing to her children. While my informant generally liked this chant for its nostalgiac purposes, her mother used it in a variety of ways at her childhood summer camp. Though I lacked the mind to gather where her mother was from, my informant is originally from California.

Context:

In summer camp, my informant says her mom learned to use the chant as a sort of password in order to get into other campers’ cabins, sit with people during meals, and participate in activities. That being said, I was able to record it during an interview for folklore collection.

Main piece:

“Hi-lo-eenie-meenie-kai-kai-oom-cha-cha-oh-pee-wah-wah-eedie-yidee-yodee-yoo-hoo”

Analysis:

I’m sure that my informant has remembered this piece her whole life because it has been reminiscent of her childhood (and because it sounds good rolling off the tongue), but the purpose it served at her mother’s summer camp allows us, as folklorists, to take a deeper look into the social lives of children. In acting as a password as a sort of key to participating in different social settings, the phrase likely created an ingroup and an outgroup which would have contributed to the children’s social hierarchy. It’s important to note, though, that my informant told me kids at this summer camp would all eventually learn the chant–after a few days of confusion followed by some practice. Thus, it must not have simply been a tool for exclusion, but a right of passage into becoming a recognized camp member.