Tag Archives: mermaid

Camp Lore: Lemonade Tower

Nationality: Eastern European Jew
Age: 15
Occupation: Student
Residence: Calabasas, California
Performance Date: March 17, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: None

Informant: “Every year at camp Kinneret, the camp counselors bring all the campers up to the lemonade tower and give them lemonade from the mermaids who live in the tower.”

 

The informant is currently a freshman in high school and lives in Calabasas, a particularly wooded area for Southern California. The informant recollected this experience from when he was a younger child attending Camp Kinneret, a summer day camp for children aged 4 -14, during the summer. The informant was approximately five years of age when he learned of this legend from his camp counselor.

According to the informant, at some point every summer the camp counselors will take the children enrolled in the camp on a hike to a nearby water tower, give them lemonade, and tell them the story of the tower. The legend was that mermaids lived in the tower and had made the lemonade for the campers who visited them. The purpose of the legend, according to the informant, was that “kids get lemonade and it gets the kids to be excited to be at a camp where there are mermaids who can make lemonade.” When asked how the informant felt about the lore he said that as a child he did believe in the mermaids and that he “thought it was awesome that mermaids were giving me lemonade.”

In the camp, this legend is age graded because as those who attended the camp got older they no longer believed in the mermaids who lived in the tower, but the informant said the counselors would tell them “not to spoil the story for the younger kids.”

I agree with the informant that this legend is a great way to get campers excited to be at camp, especially because the legend is focused on younger members, around four to six, who might be afraid to be away at a camp.

“If you go swimming right after you eat, you will turn into an ugly mermaid.”

Name: Veronica Cohen
Nationality: Puerto Rican
Primary Language: English; Other Language: Spanish
Age: 31
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: West Los Angeles

“If you go swimming right after you eat, you will turn into an ugly mermaid.”
Veronica told me that this is something her mother said all the time when she was a child. She said that when she was younger, she loved swimming and would try to do it whenever she could. In order to prevent her from going into the water so soon after she ate, Veronica’s mother would tell her that she would turn into an ugly mermaid if she didn’t wait 30 minutes before jumping into the pool. For the longest time, Veronica made sure to wait after eating, since she didn’t want to become an ugly mermaid.
This can be seen as a sort of remedy because Veronica’s mother had to think of a way to prevent her daughter from getting indigestion in a fun and imaginative way. Children have a hard time remembering rules, especially rules that keep them from doing what they want. Since children are not going to realize that mermaids don’t exist, they are likely to believe that they will turn into ugly creatures when they don’’t listen to their parents.