A local children’s ministry is doing ads for a special outreach on the talk radio station to which I generally listen.
From what I know of the ministry, it’s a good one that does fine, much-needed work.
But I find their promotion very odd.
They’re raising funds to get kids backpacks and supplies for school. Their ad features a kid getting his stuff together at the start of the year. He finds out his mother hasn’t bought him a new backpack, and he pitches a fit, saying all the kids will laugh at him because he’s using last year’s backpack.
Maybe I’m a heartless jerk, but there are a lot of things in the world I worry about more than kids having to use the same backpack two years in a row. I got laughed at a whole lot when I was a kid, and I’d have been pretty relieved if it’d had only been a matter of derision of my school supplies.
I keep wondering if this is some kind of head-fake. I’m sure the people who carry on this ministry have to deal with kids whose parents are neglecting them due to drug use, or sexually abusing them, or pimping them out. I wonder if they’re doing this backpack thing because they’re afraid to tell about the real needs they have to try to fill.
But if that’s true, they’re being dishonest with their donors, which I hope would not be the case.
So I just don’t get it.
Speaking of school kids, it occurred to me to wonder whether anybody’s done a folklore study of children’s traditional poetry.
I don’t mean the stuff written for children, like A Child’s Garden of Verses or the books of Dr. Seuss.
I mean the stuff composed by children, who knows how long ago, and passed down through generations from kid to kid?
Poems like “I Think I’ll Go Eat Worms,” and “________ and __________, sittin’ in a tree,” and little girls’ jump rope rhymes. And parodies like, “Glory, glory, hallelujah, teacher hit me with a ruler.”
It seems to me this is an example of a purely oral tradition, still alive in our literate culture. I’d think much could be learned by tracking those poems over the years and generations, observing how they change and stay the same.
Maybe somebody’s done that. But I can’t find anything about it on the web.
I used to read folklore. I even thought about buying volumes of Foxfire several years ago. What you’re saying about children lore is true and the very reason no one has done a study. Some people have tried to recapture things once they became adults, but they didn’t remember things well, if at all. Children, of course, don’t think about it. They just repeat the jokes, the rhymes, and the songs as they hear them. I doubt there’s a way to trace origin. It’s all oral tradition.
Still, the Scouts may be a great place to start researching this stuff, even if very few origins are ever discovered. That’s the nature of folklore–little documentation, lots of variation.
This is the song that never ends.
It goes on and on, my friends.
Some people started singing it,
not knowing what it was,
And they’ll continue singing it forever just because this is the song that never ends. . . .
The closest I’ve come to finding anything is the book “A Rocket in My Pocket” – The Rhymes and Chants of Young Americans, published in 1948. It was compiled by Carl Withers, and the last chapter, consisting of only a few pages, brings it all around to “…but in the end nothing was accepted for “A Rocket in My Pocket” for which the editor failed to find the sanction of an oral version.”
I’ve always wondered where “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, Your house is on fire and your children will burn.” comes from. Like an earworm, that gets stuck in my head.
I find it strangely odd that there isn’t more ‘out there’ about this.
I confess, Judy, I thought that might have been a Peter, Paul, and Mary song, so I looked it up. Here’s a page on it, saying it refers to English history of Catholics and Protestants.