What Childhood Folklore Did You Learn As a Kid?
I loved this post by Kelsey Miller for Cup of Jo about “childlore”.
“Remember typing ‘BOOBS’ on a calculator?!” someone will blurt. “Or — or that thing when you’re driving by a cemetery and you have to hold your breath?” I love hearing the tiny differences in details (some people grew up lifting their feet off the floor when passing a graveyard). But what’s wild is how many of us grew up doing, drawing, singing, and believing the exact same funny little things: Miss Susie had a steamboat, Batman smelled, the floor was lava, and stepping on cracks broke our mothers’ backs.
For a definition of childlore, let’s go to the Wikipedia:
Childlore is a folklore or folk culture that focuses specifically on children typically between the ages of 6 and 15. As a branch of folklore, childlore is concerned with those activities which are learned and passed on by children to other children; it excludes the stories and tales told and spread by adults. Childlore can include games, riddles, rhymes, oral stories, codes, fantasies, jokes, and superstitions created by children.
Other than what’s already been mentioned, I can’t remember many specific childlore from my childhood (my recall for such things isn’t great). Perhaps some string games? I can still do cat’s cradle & Jacob’s ladder and taught them to my kids when they were younger. Oh and those cootie catchers.
The commenters at Cup of Jo offered several suggestions: the diarrhea song, padiddle (when you saw a car with only one headlight), and slug bug (or punch buggy). And OMG, I gasped when I read this comment — I used to make these little feet all the time!
Just recently on a field trip with my kids we all traveled in a school bus. We live in Wisconsin so it was chilly in the bus and the bus driver had the heater turned on high. The condensation in the bus was freezing on the inside of the windows as it so often does on a winter morning her and then it’s fun to draw things in the frost. My favorite is to press the side of my fist against the glass to make a little footprint and then use my fingers to make toes. It looks like a baby footprint on the window.
What childlore do you remember from your childhood?
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Yes to little baby feet!
Cool S. Folded paper ninja stars. Paper triangle football. Hyper-regional four-square rules (popcorn, cherry bomb, bobbles). Hand clapping rhymes. Stiff as a board, light as a feather. This is fun!
I loved paper triangle football…that’s another one I passed down to my kids.
Iona Opie has a collection of childhood rhymes (illustrated by Maurice Sendak!) that trace this kind of thing way back. It turns out some childhood rhymes are hundreds of years old, passed child to child down through the ages. The annotated collection is called ‘I Saw Esau’ and I buy one whenever I see one. I’ve given many away to parents.
String games are thousands of years old and a human universal! I recommend this podcast ep if you want to learn more: https://manyminds.libsyn.com/string-theories
Clothespin matchstick shooter, tons of gory campfire songs: "My eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school…", "Glory, glory hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler…", lots of versions of "on top of old smokey", "Bang, Bang Lulu…"
I remember when a family friend showed me how to make the baby feet and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
This was more teenage lore maybe than Childlore but somehow at our first grade seven dance, everyone knew to shout “hey mother fucker get laid get fucked” in the Mony Mony chorus.
Also, “if your hand is bigger than your face you have cancer.” (The victim then gets their hand shoved in their face when they try.)
Or hold your fingers in a circle. If someone looks at it you get to punch them in the arm. Hold it above waist level though and you get punched.
Also the card game “bloody knuckles” where the loser gets the deck of cards smashed on their knuckles.
In retrospect maybe Winnipeg of the 1980s was just kind of a messed up place?
Does “the cool S” count as childlore?
For some reason we didn’t do “punch buggy” but we did yell “woodchuck” and punch each other in the arm when we saw a car with wood panels.
My oldest kid is already 19… and I've spotted her still holding her breath when we drive across the Golden Gate Bridge.
Maple seed helicopters. Chewing on sour grass and sucking the nectar out of honeysuckle. Making wishes on dandelions. That cheek-flick water-drop sound. Armpit farts. Folding and wearing paper claws. Building towers with playing cards. So many hours of cat's cradle. Starlight, Starbright, first star I see tonight...
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