What makes the long vacation special?

I was thinking today about what made summer/the long vacation so special to me as a child. It wasn't just the length of the time between the school semesters, it was an amalgam of other things such as: not having to do homework; more relaxed bedtimes since we didn't have to get up to go to school in the morning; the smell of newly mowed lawns; spending weeks at a time with my grandparents; eating wild fruits and berries; having as much time as I liked to read; the light still pouring through my bedroom window when I went to bed; day long excursions with other children in the neighbourhood through the secret passageways of the forest that we thought our parents didn't know about.

How about you? What are your special memories of childhood? What memories do you hope your children will build? What do our children enjoy most about their long vacations?

--mmy

---

 

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Comments

[Froborr]

There's 104 days of summer vacation*
And school comes along just to end it
So the annual challenge for our generation
Is finding a good way to spend it

Yeah, I have nothing to contribute, except that I just discovered the Disney cartoon Phineas and Ferb this past weekend, and it is entirely about summer vacation.

I don't really remember much of my own childhood, and what I do remember is nigh-impossible to date. I don't particularly recall summer vacation, except for the Final Summer after senior year. That one was pretty cool.

-----

*Phineas and Ferb are lucky punks. We had less than 80 days of summer vacation.

[MercuryBlue]

I wonder what people in school-year-round places think of Phineas and Ferb.

[Froborr]

I don't know. Anybody reading who lives in such a place and has an opinion on Phineas and Ferb?

[lonespark]

My son has 50 days of summer vacation. I think this might be "business days." But yeah, P+F, WTF?

[Mmy]

@lonespark: My son has 50 days of summer vacation. I think this might be "business days."

Yeah, around here the school runs till the end of June and begins just before Labour day. So that leaves about 50 business days in the long vacation. They are talking very, very seriously about making it a shorter break. One of the main arguments against having a shorter long vacation is the cost of air conditioning the schools (indeed many of the older schools don't have any air conditioning.) We expect it to top 38C (over 100F) tomorrow and kids just don't learn a lot in that weather.

[Froborr]

Phineas and Ferb's school appears to be out from June 3 to September 15, if we go by the opening credits. That's assuming they don't mean business days, which would just be... absurd.

When I was a kid school ended on the last Friday in June, and started the day after Labor Day.

IIRC, the original reason for summer vacation was so that kids could help on their parents' farms? That never made much sense to me, though; I don't know much about farming, but I would think August-September would be the busiest time, not July.

[Izzy]

Getting to go away for weeks at a time was huge, yeah. It really let me develop relationships with my grandparents and family, and get familiar with new places, which has served me better than either long division or volleyball. The long vacation also really served as a period to one school year: if someone was going to change a lot, one way or another, it generally happened on summer break.

I remember sitting under the loquat tree in my back yard and reading many, many books. Going down the road to pick strawberries. Seeing the country, somewhat unwillingly, from the back seat of my parents' car. Long hot nights talking to my friends online and eating cartloads of Otter Pops. (Sugar, flavoring, water, little cartoon otter on the front. For the win.) Swimming. Just sort of being around, and unpressured.

Summer break where I grew up ran from mid-June to early September; my boarding school vacation ran from early June (depending on your finals) to early September; and my college from early May to late August, but the first two weeks were a "shopping period" for most of your classes, and didn't count, so it was mostly about seeing who was a) new and/or b) hot.

I miss those days. Annnnnd I'm back in the office tomorrow. Adulthood has its benefits, in theory...

[bluefrog]

I'm old. Summer vacation ran from early June to just after Labor Day. It was a time of warm weather, long vacations--generally to the beach--sleeping in, and release from the constant supervision of adults. Nobody was insisting that you learn things all day, supervising your homework at night, or making sure you were home in time for dinner every night. Kids in the era when I was a kid of ten or eleven got to walk a couple of blocks to a convenience store (in a suburb,yet!) for ice cream, explore the remaining bits of woods and streams for turtles, bike to the neighborhood pool, hang out in each others' basements and yards, and generally not have to be home until it got too dark to see. I don't think that happens much any more.

[Brin]

Long vacations aren't quite as special as they're made out to be, in my opinion. Autumn breaks are just like weekends, only much longer.

Having the break in autumn instead of summer has worked well up until now (better weather, less competition when going to amusement parks and such), but Mom's pushing me to have a much shorter or nonexistent break this year to have a standard September start in university. On the one hand, the online course I'm starting off with allows you to begin at the first day of any month. November's just as good as September to them. On the other hand, I suppose it has to happen sometime.

[hapax]

I always thought the greatest thing about summer vacation was the luxury to be bored.

I don't remember where I read it, but there was a thesis out there that claimed that the origins of "civilization" -- the things we think of as uniquely human accomplishments, like religion and the arts and organized sport and the like -- lie in the fact that sophisticated agriculture and the beginnings of urban life freed up huge chunks of time for most people, and they needed something to DO.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but I also don't remember the last time I was bored (seriously bored, hours-long bored, there are no books left to read and there's nothing worth watching on television bored, spending eight hours shuffling and re-shuffling a deck of cards and teaching myself to cut it one-handed bored, lying on the ground staring at ants as they crawled up one leaf and down another and actually feeling mildly invested in which one made it first bored) but it was probably near the end of the last summer I didn't have to get a job.

I miss that. Now, even when everything I have to do is *boring*, I still don't have the time or freedom to be fully bored by it.

Of course, watching my children, it seems that they are continuously plugged into at least three amusement devices, and they don't really know the feeling of boredom either. But I might be wrong.

[Froborr]

I don't remember where I read it, but there was a thesis out there that claimed that the origins of "civilization" -- the things we think of as uniquely human accomplishments, like religion and the arts and organized sport and the like -- lie in the fact that sophisticated agriculture and the beginnings of urban life freed up huge chunks of time for most people, and they needed something to DO.

I have heard this claim too, but IIRC the invention of agriculture and permanent settlements actually significantly *reduced* the average person's leisure time. Agriculture is more physically demanding, time-consuming, and repetitive compared to hunting and gathering, and up until fairly recently any agricultural society had to devote the majority of its population to food production. Again IIRC (nearly a decade since I took my last anthropology class) the average person's leisure time didn't get back to hunter-gatherer levels until the invention of the five-day workweek.

Of course, agriculture frees up a fraction of the population to not work on food production at all, and instead do things like form priesthoods, create art, fight wars, make laws, build buildings, and so on. More importantly, it allows you to support a massive population compared to the number of hunter-gatherers you can keep on the same land, so even though average leisure time goes down, total leisure time of everyone in the society put together goes up. So it's still completely plausible that increased leisure time was responsible for the development of civilization.

[lonespark]

More like, concentrated leisure time available to certain people?

Long vacation is not leisure time because so much must be planned, children are underfoot, etc. But long weekends or short vacations are great. Esp. 1 or 2 week vacations: Long enough to get through the tiredness, and even acomplish a really necessary thing or two, but then just have long stretches of doing what you prefer.

[Lonespark]

Off-topic, I may be beyond the reach of internet when the board discussion thing is happening. I will try to get to the library somewhere in there, though.

[cjmr, on her son's netbook]

I really really hope that my children remember fondly the weeks we spend each summer at their various grandparents so that they can spend time with the grandparents and cousins, because each year it gets harder and more stressful for me to do it. And by the end of the visit I need a vacation from togetherness. I really envy husband who gets to go back to work at the end of the vacation (adult conversation! no three weeks of laundry! air-conditioning!) while I get everything set up for the next school year.

This year being an election year just makes everything soooo much more stressful.

[Amaryllis]

Proust had his madeleines, I get... mosquito repellent?

Seriously, I was sitting outside this evening, trying to get a little fresh air when the day was not so frickin HOT-- it was down to only Hot -- and I'd given myself a spritz of Off before going out, since it's another one of those summers with the bugs. And I was breathing the smell on my skin and thinking, I've been smelling that smell for far too many summers.

It reminds me of the clouds of pesticide that used to be sprayed all over the neighborhood when I was little. And no, it never occurred to anyone to tell the kids to go inside when the trucks went past. We went right on playing Tag and Red Light and Statues, if we didn't decide to go chasing the trucks, the better to breathe in more of the poison.

It reminds me of camping trips (more mosquitoes) and beach trips (more mosquitoes, and those horrible stinging flies, and the little no-see-ums).

I kept thinking that there's got to be a better summery scent to reminisce about. But it is what it is.

Do kids even play those games any more? Tag, hide-and-seek, jumprope, hopscotch? Was mine the last generation to learn the proper things to chant while the rope goes around?

Every summer I tell myself that I won't waste this summer. I'm really going to appreciate it this year! And every summer I'm still doing the same things that I do the rest of the year, and every fall I wonder where the summer went.

[cjmr, on her son's netbook]

"Do kids even play those games any more? Tag, hide-and-seek, jumprope, hopscotch? Was mine the last generation to learn the proper things to chant while the rope goes around?"

Mine play tag, hide-and-seek, and hopscotch, but not jumprope.

[Mike Timonin]

Do kids even play those games any more? Tag, hide-and-seek, jumprope, hopscotch? Was mine the last generation to learn the proper things to chant while the rope goes around?

The homeschool gaggle play tag and hide-and-seek constantly. Also, Simon says. Hopscotch boards appear on the sidewalk spontaneously overnight, so I assume someone is still playing hopscotch - aliens, perhaps - and I know that I've seen kids jumping rope, although none of my group does. Lots of running around outside with various sticks, though.

[cjmr, who really should be helping pack the car, on her son's netbook]

Running around with various sticks, FTW. Although unlike in our day when the various sticks were rifles or bows or spears, they are now usually lightsabers...

[Izzy]

I really feel like hopscotch should open a gateway to another dimension in *some* form of media.

[Froborr]

@Izzy: That is the awesomest idea I've encountered in weeks.

[lonespark]

Ours were lightsabers. They had been garden stakes.

Sticks FTW.

[Froborr]

When I was a kid, they were swords. Princess Bride came out when I was six, and was *huge* at my school for several years following. Star Wars, on the other hand, was only slightly less nerdy than Star Trek.

Then, of course, the teachers found out and banned it, just like every other cool game we came up with. Stick Fighting, Swing Joust, Swing Dodge, Wallball...

[Andrea]

@Izzy: Not quite the same, but there's an early episode of Deep Space Nine where a hopscotch-like game is the key to getting through a barrier. It really isn't (quite) as silly as it sounds.

[Mike Timonin]

That was a good DS9 episode.

In elementary school (Colby Village Elementary, in Dartmouth, NS, for those keeping track), we had two outdoor activities which the school did not officially endorse in anyway. One was marbles (which was, of course, gambling), and the other was chasing each other through the woods. Which resulted in stitches for at least one student - me. I know that, in 5th grade, the school dug up the place where we played marbles and covered it with gravel, making it impossible to play there. I don't know what they did about the running through the woods thing - probably the same, really. Booo.

[Mmy]

my favourite hopscotch image was this picture taken the first summer after the Obama family moved into the White House.

[Brin, who is getting error messages when trying to log in]

I've probably played some form of lightsabre-duel at some point, but when I think of playing with sticks I think of two things: the one time I took a flexible stick and a piece of string and made a bow that could shoot other sticks several inches without practice or fletching, and the many times I provided music for the other kids using sticks and the metal bars of playsets. (I don't know if they enjoyed my drumming, but I don't think anyone ever tried to stop me.)

I have seen spontaneously-generated hopscotch boards, but I have very little idea what one is supposed to do with them. Something involving skipping? Maybe?

[Froborr]

@Brin: Basically, it's a game where you create a "board" and then throw a rock into the first square, then hop through each square of the board in numerical order.
The rules we played by were that you had to hop on one foot unless there were two squares side-by-side, then you had to land both feet in them simultaneously, and you had to jump over the square the stone was in. If you failed at that, touched a line, touched anything outside the square you were aiming for, or hesitated too long between jumps, your turn ended.

If you made it all the way through, you tossed the rock in the next square and repeated; otherwise the next person took their turn. First person to make it all the way through won.

[lonespark]

My son has learned hopscotch in kindergarten. I never learnt it.

This business of banned games makes me think of the popular game at my elementary school in Thailand: digging mudholes and covering them up, so kids would fall in. We were seriously industrious about this: the holes were 2 ft. deep, we carried water to fill them with, we constructed elaborate bean-pod thatch to cover them, and buried them... The administration didn't seem to be much concerned.

One thing somebody got in trouble about was a kid <>falling into an open, water filled crypt. So I guess there was a cemetary behind the school? There must have been more to it; maybe she was forced into it by bullies? The nuns were very angry.

[Anonymous]

@Amaryllis

Cinderella dressed in yella went to the ball to kiss a fella made a mistake and kissed a snake how many stitches did it take? one, two, three...

That's the only one that we used for jump rope, when I was growing up, but I remember lots of different clapping games: "Miss Suzie had a steamboat", "Miss Mary mack", "Down in the banks of the hanky panky where the bullfrogs jump from bank to banky singing a-e-i-o-u ker plop", "down down baby down by the rollercoaster".... And there were lots of counting games in use (not just "eenie meenie miney moe, catch a tiger by the toe" but also "bubble gum bubble gum in a dish, how many pieces do you wish")

I think I was the first one in our group of seven year olds to figure out that eenie meenie miney moe had 28 syllables and I could affect the outcome by affecting where I started with a little modular arithmetic.

[Brin, who is getting error messages when trying to log in]

"Miss Mary mack"

I used to play that with Mom and she would always tickle me at the end. I hated that one.

(After a while I learned to make pained screams instead of laughter when tickled. I find it's actually quite easy to do, but despite that it was usually enough to make people stop tickling me.)

[Anonymous]

we always played Miss Mary Mack without tickling. There was tickling for "this little piggy went to market", though, when it was going "wee wee wee all the way home".

content warning: mutually consensual (And enthusiastic) infliction of pain on children by other children

And we had this game that we called rose bush or something, I can't remember the rhyme that went with it, but you took someone's arm and then you raked your nails down it, hard, to "till the soil" and then you pinched the little rows, hard, also with your fingernails, to plant the roses, and then you slapped the arm a lot, hard, to indicate the rain, and it went on and on like that, and by the end of it the person's arm was bright red, like a rose garden. And then someone else would cry "me next do me next i want a rose garden too!" and they would patiently submit their arm to this procedure. Kids are weird :D

[hapax]

One of the elementary schools I attended had just installed (at great expense) the newest and niftiest playground equipment. It was all ignored in favor of the huge ditch left behind by the construction. Every recess the entire school would line up along the ditch and spend their time jumping across -- kindergarteners and the generally timid at the narrow parts, the big boys and the daring across the the widest gaps. We were all crushed when the authorities had the ditch filled in.

Other than that, I don't recall jumprope, but we would use sticks in a jumping game: four people would hold four long sticks in a cross pattern, and clap them together and bang them on the floor, for others to jump through and across. Years later I saw "sword dances" that looked very similar.

Other thant that: hopscotch, foursquare, kickball, Cinderella statues, and a particularly violent but breathtakingly simple game known as (ROT13 for homophobic slur, although it wasn't meant that way) "fzrne gur dhrre"or "kill the man with the ball".

The only game I remember that deliberately inflicted pain for fun was a card game called "Bloody Jacks": if one of the players drew a jack (or something like that? It's been a long time), zie was allowed to form the deck into a pointed wedge and strike the other players across the knuckles. Weird game. I think it was only popular because the school officials tried so hard to ban it.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

I've seen the rose garden thing done. I think I was in my mid teens before that one became popular around here, so I missed it. But yes, kids are weird. (There was a chap in my primary school who enjoyed being squashed behind the door. He'd get behind the door, and I and perhaps a few others would lean on the door to squash him as much as we could. Strange.)

Another craze which went through my primary school was skipping with an elastic band. There were these big elastic loops, like knicker elastic or something, and two kids would stand facing each other with their legs apart, the band around their ankles, for another kid to jump over the band in the middle.

Jump in: left foot outside the elastic rectangle, one in the middle: "England!"
Jump over: left foot inside, right foot outside: "Ireland!"
Jump back: "Scotland!"
Back again: "Wales!"

Jump so both feet are inside: "Inside!"
Both outside, straddling the rectangle: "Outside!"
Back inside: "Inside!"
Jump to land on the elastic, pressing it down to the ground: "Scales!"

There were four more positions, of increasing complexity. One was the "diamond": you hooked the elastic around your own ankles to form a diamond, jumped up, allowing the elastic to break free from your ankles and spring back to position, and landed as for scales.
Another of the complex positions was called "gun", but I forget how it was formed.

Once you'd run through the whole sequence, the kids at the end would raise the elastic to half-way up their calves, and you could do it again. Knee level was quite tough, and anything higher pretty much impossible.

Fun!

I don't know where those elastics came from, or what the game was actually called, or whether it was actually played anywhere at all other than our little Church of Ireland primary school. But I still remember it.

TRiG.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

And I don't know why I'm talking about schoolyard games when the ostensible topic is the long summer holidays.

We played elaborate fantasy games with the neighbouring kids. We went on long cycle rides to the beech on the river near Clonaslee. We climbed mountains. We visited our grandparents in England. We read books. On Saturday nights, we locked ourselves in the livingroom, tuned into Atlantic 252, which played classic rock from six till midnight with no talking and fairly short ad breaks. (Our parents listened to the same station in the kitchen, actually on the same radio, as there was a small hole for the speaker cables to go through from the hi fi.)

I loved the long summer holidays. So did our parents, actually, most of the time. My mother has said that seeing ripe blackberries in the hedgerow always made her slightly sad, because it meant we'd soon be going back to school.

TRiG.

[lonespark]

Keep talking about schoolyard games! It's really intersting!

[Izzy]

TW: Painful kids' games.

Oh, man, the rose garden. Also the "Hertz Donut" (punch the other person in the arm: "Hurts, don' it?") and the "Stamp Collection" (stamp on the other person's foot: "This is the stamp I got from Billy. This is the stamp I got from Bobby..." continue until fight breaks out). And bloody knuckles, of course.

There was also some kind of non-painful but excessively *weird*...thing...that involved wiggling your fingers up and down the other person's back while chanting. I don't remember most of it, except that it was bizarre, but the "chorus" was something like "Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate on yellow. People are dying, children are crying. Concentrate. Concentrate."

Apparently I grew up in a David Lynch film.

Oh, and Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, which was an excellent sleepover game: you lie in the middle of a group of friends, everyone chants the titular phrase, and theoretically they're supposed to be able to lift you with everyone using only her (usually her) pinkie finger. Something about weight distribution.

We tried to play this for shits 'n' giggles in my high school common room, and freaked the hell out of the house counselor who walked in on it.

Josepha Sherman also authored an anthology of kids' schoolyard rhymes and songs, called "Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts," which is excellent reading.

[Brin]

Izzy: There was also some kind of non-painful but excessively *weird*...thing...that involved wiggling your fingers up and down the other person's back while chanting. I don't remember most of it, except that it was bizarre, but the "chorus" was something like "Concentrate. Concentrate. Concentrate on yellow. People are dying, children are crying. Concentrate. Concentrate."

And you're sure you didn't dream that?

[Andrea]

I remember seeing jumping games with the big elastic band around the other girls' ankles (I grew up in the US Midwest), but I never knew how it was played.

[Izzy]

@Brin: Mostly sure, anyhow. I should ask my sister if she remembers.

[hapax]

@Izzy -- we had a "game" like that, that involved drawing circles on the other person's back, over and over, while chanting (tries to remember):

There's a circle on your back
there's a circle on your back
Around and around
The circle is spinning
The circle is twirling
Around and around
The circle is spinning
Looking for the string
Around and around
[beat]
I've found the string
When I pull it, you will DIE!

Then you lightly pinched their back and pulled, like drawing out an imaginary string. Supposedly the person you have "hypnotized" will fall over into a momentary coma. We all claimed it "worked" on us, or at least we pretended ourselves into believing it.

Kids are really weird.

[Amaryllis]

@Anonymous: "Blondie and Dagwood went downtown, Blondie bought an evening gown, Dagwood bought a pair of shoes and Cookie bought the Evening News!"

(Ah, the good old days when there were evening papers...)

"Miss Suzie had a steamboat"
I wouldn't know about that, but Miss Lucy had a baby. She named him Tiny Tim.

"I love coffee, I love tea, I love the boys and the boys love me: Yes, no, maybe so..."
(And nobody would admit to purposely missing the beat on Yes.)

Does anybody remember a game we called "Mississippi"? A line of girls would link hands and duck under each other's arms in a circle while chanting: "M I S, S I S, S I P P I!" If you did it right, you'd end up in a tight knot of bodies, everybody's arms crossed over their chests, back to back, on the final "I". I can't remember now how it was done. Or why we thought it was fun. Or why, for that matter, Mississippi

TriG: I loved the long summer holidays. So did our parents, actually, most of the time.
As a parent, I loved them too. And I hope my daughter enjoyed them. But she didn't have the same kind of gang of children to run with that I had. Idle fun was harder to come by, for her.

Also, her school year began two or three weeks earlier than mine used to. It's just wrong to be going back to school before Labor Day. (And counterproductive; half the schools aren't air-conditioned and those August days are hot.)

[Anonymous]

@Brin:

content notice: children's rhymes are disturbing

Izzy and I had the same dream. While you ran your fingers on the person's back, you chanted "there's a knife in your back and the blood is dripping down, there's a knife in your back and the blood is dripping down." and also in another part of it you'd mime cracking an egg on someone's head "there's an egg in your hair and the yolk is dripping down, there's an egg in your hair and the yolk is dripping down." The chorus was what Izzy said ... except I don't remember the "concentrate concentrate" part of it, just the people dying children crying bit, which was sung in a sing song sort of way. but the rest all fits.

@Amaryllis:

Miss Suzie had a steamboat
The steamboat had a bell (Ding ding)
Miss Suzie went to heaven,
The steamboat went to hello operator,
please give me number nine
and if you disconnect me,
I'll chop off your behind
the 'frigerator, there lay a piece of glass
Miss Suzie sat upon it and broke her little
ask me no more questions, please tell me no more lies
the boys are in the bathroom, zipping up their
flies are in the meadow, the bees are in the park
Miss Suzie and her boyfriend are kissing in the
D-A-R-K D-A-R-K D-A-R-K dark dark dark
dark is like a movie, a movie's like a show
a show is like a tv screen and that is all i know
I know I know my mother, I know I know my pa
I know I know my sister wears a 40 acre bra!

I almost got whooped for singing that one, because it had a swear word in it, but when I explained that the flies bit was referring to the insect not to the zipper on a person's jeans, it was clear to my parents that the actual almost-swear words had both gone over my head.

[Anonymous]

And now I do remember the concentrate part. weird how that works. maybe i just think I remember it.

[Froborr]

Huh. Our Miss Suzy was longer, and part of the point was to do the entire thing without taking a breath until the last line.

I know I know my sister wears a 40 acre

Broccoli is good for you Carrots help you see Excuse me for a moment I think I have to Peanut butter jelly Ham and cheese on rye [Line I don't remember] [dramatically, with jazz hands] I think I'm gonna diiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeee

Also while we knew of the steamboat version, our version of Miss Suzy had "baby" instead.

[cjmr, who is HOME!, on her son's netbook]

We called the elastic thing for jumping in/through 'Chinese Jumprope'. I was better at that than regular jumprope.

[Nick Kiddle]

We had a counting-out rhyme that went "Micky Mouse, in his house, pulling down his trousers, what colour is his bum: red, white, or blue?" and one that went "It bit, dog shit, you put your foot in it, you are not it." The clearest thing in my mind was how naughty it felt to be using those words, as if we were putting one over the adults.

There was a skipping game where you recited the months of the year and each person had to jump in and out as their own birth month was called. I was never invited to play because I was far too clumsy to skip. There were hopscotch grids painted on the playground, but I don't think any of them ever used them for their intended purpose. I sometimes pretended they were road markings or battlefield landmarks, depending what I was imagining that day.

[Izzy]

@Anonymous: Oh, the blood/yolk bit! Now I remember that, too. Hee. Glad I wasn't hallucinating, there. ;)

Also Miss Suzy. My hypothetical sister's bra varied between 40 acres and 40 meters, I believe. And the subsequent verse went:

My ma gave me a nickel
My pa gave me a dime
My sister gave me a boyfriend
He looked like Frankenstein
He made me wash the dishes
He made me wash the floor
He made me wash his underwear
So I kicked him out the door
I kicked him over London
I kicked him over France
I kicked him to Hawaii where he did the hula dance
Hula hula.

@Froborr: Well, the baby going to Hell makes more sense than the steamboat, depending on your belief system.

[kisekileia]

I remember the Miss Mary Mack and Miss Suzie clapping games, and I remember continually feeling frustrated and excluded because my motor skills weren't good enough to play them. I'm not sure if I ever really knew the rules for hopscotch, other than "hop on the squares in succession with one foot." It's one of the many, many things that are just sort of there in popular culture, but that I've never really understood because nobody ever explained them to me and/or I wasn't exposed to the appropriate media enough to learn them.

[Amaryllis]

@Anonymous et. al.: No, our song about Miss Lucy and her baby was something else entirely. We did, though, enjoy singing the one about the Three Jolly Fishermen:

They all went down to Amster...SHH!

Mustn't say that naughty word...

Gonna say it anyhow...

They all went down to AmsterDAM, Amster, Amster, DAM DAM DAM...

And our parents and Scout leaders would smile benignly.

[Mike Timonin]

Clapping and skipping rhymes were for girls, and so I never actually learned them, but we all did M.A.S.H., where you drew a box and wrote mash at the bottom and 1234 at the top, and the names of four cities down one side and the initials of four members of the opposite sex down the other (or the same person four times, if that was your inclination), and then the person who was running the game drew dots or spirals in the middle until you said stop. And the number of dots or circles in the box determined how many spaces you moved, starting at 1 - when you got to the number, which ever space was covered got x'ed out, and you started again until only one space on each side of the box was open, which determined your future spouse, how many children you would have, which city you would live in, and if you would have a mansion, an apartment, a shack, or a house.

[Andrea]

The baby version was definitely more benign, in that it didn't delight nine-year-olds into believing they were secretly vulgar. I remember that the girls I knew ended the steamboat version at "zipping up their flies", which I remember because it would be followed by an enthusiastic cheer of "zip zip!"

Miss Susie had a baby
She named him Tiny Tim
She put him in bathtub
To see if he could swim

He drank up all the water
He ate up all the soap
He tried to eat the bathtub
But it wouldn't go down his throat

Miss Susie called the doctor
The doctor called the nurse
The nurse called the lady
With the alligator purse

"Mumps" said the doctor
"Measles" said the nurse
"Ice cream" said the lady
With the alligator purse

[lonespark]

I never (maybe twice? With my black friend who was bused to our school from the inner city? Which is a whole other can of worms...) really did the clapping games, but I was aware of them...and now Miss Suzie is STUCK IN MY HEAD, damn you all.

We had "Chinese jump rope" in Thailand, except we just called it jump rope, and we made the "rope" by knotting together tens or hundreds of rubber bands. The rubber bands probably came from somewhere, like on something families would regularly buy? Lots of free toy things came with grocery items. There was a game we played with tiny plastic swords, where you put them on the ground and tried to blow yours on top of someone else's. The swords came free with something, and when we didn't have swords we would try to do it with 1-baht coins, which was more challenging and less variable/interesting.

[Froborr]

@Mike Timonin: Interesting. For us, future-predicting games and skipping rhymes were always for girls, clapping rhymes were for girls except on long bus rides for field trips when boys did them too.

I played hopscotch for a couple weeks in fifth grade with a girl named Anna--she taught me, and as far as I know we were the only people in the school who played--until I happened to mention it to my father, who informed me that hopscotch was also for girls.

[Brin]

kisekileia: It's one of the many, many things that are just sort of there in popular culture, but that I've never really understood because nobody ever explained them to me and/or I wasn't exposed to the appropriate media enough to learn them.

I know the feeling.

@Froborr
So what did boys play? I'm guessing lightsabre-duel, but what else?

[Froborr]

@Brin: Variations on the theme of violence:

Swing Joust: Two people on adjacent swings face in opposite directions. Each sticks out one leg. Swing and kick the other person's sole with yours; the goal is to spin them around so that the chains of the swing touch.

Swing Dodge: Draw a line in the dirt in front of the swings. Everyone on the swings starts swinging, and then the player has to run down the line. If they make it across, they get a turn to swing, and the next person in line gets to run; if they step off the line or get hit by a swinger they have to go to the back of the line. If they cry or fall down they're banned from the swings for the day.

Wallball: Requires one of those big, light rubber balls, like you use for kickball. You throw the ball at the wall; if someone else catches it after it bounces off the wall, you have to Stand. If the ball hits the ground, whoever touched it last has to to Stand. Standing means standing with you hands on the wall and your forehead almost, but not quite, touching the wall, while the other players take turns throwing the ball at your head. Also, you can only take one step while holding the ball, or else you have to Stand.

Girls occasionally took part in all these games, but they were mostly played by boys.

[Mike Timonin]

It's a wonder any of us ever lived to adulthood...

Gender inclusive games - we moved after 5th grade, and the new elementary school had two games (middle/high school, we didn't play games at recess/lunch) which involved both genders - "Girls vs. Boys" and frisbee tag. GvB was, basically, king of the castle, but we also yanked up chunks of sod and threw them at each other. Frisbee tag was tag, but "it" tagged you by pegging you with a frisbee from a distance. There was some sort of complicated rule where you could catch the frisbee, and that meant that you weren't tagged? Or something? I don't remember.

I haven't thought about this sort of thing in years...

[Winter]

At my elementary school, we played a version of wallball that used a tennis ball or some other rubbery ball of the same size (a blue raquetball does well). You throw the ball at the wall and everyone tries to catch it. You have to throw from wherever you caught it, but if it hits the ground before hitting the wall, you have to run up and touch the wall. While you're running, anyone else can grab the ball and throw it at you. I'm pretty sure we never played it with a baseball.

[Ross]

Frisbee tag was tag, but "it" tagged you by pegging you with a frisbee from a distance.

(emphasis mine)

<SPIT-TAKE>

Oh. Right. Duh. Damn you, Dan Savage.

[Mike Timonin]

Frisbee tag was tag, but "it" tagged you by pegging you with a frisbee from a distance.

Oh. Right. Duh. Damn you, Dan Savage.

Ummm. Yeah. Not that sort of pegging.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

At home, we had a treehouse with a swing. You lie on your back on the sawdust under the swing. Someone else picks up the swing seat, holds it high, and drops it. And the seat, a hefty hunk of timber, comes dropping down toward your face till it is caught by the ropes and stops inches from your nose.

Fun times.

***

Back in primary school, some of the older kids would link up, arms across each others' shoulders, and march around the playground chanting "We're on strike! We're on strike!" I have no idea what that was about.

For picking who was "it" in chasing games, we'd all stand together with the toes of our shoes (one foot only) touching. Someone would dip a finger twice in the "ink pot" formed in the centre if the shoes, then run round. I forget what the rhyme was. It wasn't the standard "eeny meeny miny moe" that was used in other situations. It may have been a process of elimination. "Ip dip it is not you," perhaps, though I feel there was more to it than that.

Clapping games did happen, but were more for girls.

The other standard game was "wall-to-wall". We all line up against one wall. The person who's "it" parades no man's land in the middle, between the two walls, and calls out a colour. Anyone wearing that colour could proceed safely to the other side; anyone not so fortunate was at risk of being caught as they tried to cross. If what people said was to be believed, some kids wore rainbow underwear. (They were never asked to show it.)

Train. I was always the train, because I was good at it. Sometimes I'd duck under the arms of someone else in the row of carriages. Sometimes I'd run and turn sharply to try to fling people off. We played all this on a tarmac school yard, with no grass. Sometimes I wonder.

Another game that was always me was the "horned dilemma". Basically a chasing game, but always me chasing. And I'd hold my two index fingers over my head as horns. (I don't know exactly where I'd picked up the phrase. I think I did actually know what it meant, but also liked the sound of it.) As a kid, I was one of the faster runners in the school. Not any more.

I played those less and less toward the end of primary school, partly because I was, however regretfully, growing up, and partly because I made one particular friend who had few other friends, and we spent most break times together building elaborate fantasy worlds involving spaceships.

***

In my final year of secondary school, there were three or four first-year boys who'd play chasing games during the break times. No one else in the school did, but they didn't seem to mind. I hope they weren't bullied for it.

***

These memories are from the house we moved to when I was thirteen:

My parents tended to have friends over for dinner quite often during the winter. Often quite a few friends at once, partly so they could "get around the congregation" and partly because larger bunches of people entertained each other. I enjoyed the adult conversations and entertainments (often card games), but if there were kids among the visitors we'd often drag them out to the garden to play Block 40 in the dark. Block 40 is an excellent game to play in the dark.

Both DuckDuckGo and Google are unaware of Block 40, so I'll detail it here. There is a "base" (in our case, usually something tall: a pole, or drainpipe, or, when playing in our garden, the central pole of the treehoue). "It" counts slowly to forty, while the others hide (easy, in the dark: you can even hide in plain site of the pole by ducking down behind one of the ducks' water buckets in the middle of the back lawn). Once the count is complete, "It" opens zir eyes and goes searching. Here's the trick. If you can get to the pole, touch it, and shout "Block 40 In!" before "It" can also get to the pole, touch it, and shout "Block 40 I see X!", you're safe.

So you hide near the pole, and hope "It" goes off searching the far side of the house, and you can stroll in. If you're caught, you're caught, and that's it.

Or you hide the far side of the house, and hope "It" walks past you at some point, and you can creep in. If you're seen, it may be a race to see who gets back to base first.

Some kids also played Tip the can, which was the same game with the addition of "Tip the can I free all!", which made "It's" job considerably harder. We always preferred Block 40. (Wikipedia has an article on Tip the can, which isn't quite by these rules. I suspect there are all sorts of variations.)

Of course, the ducks would be locked away at night time, and their enclosure was off bounds, but during the day they were out on the back lawn, so there was a fence across the top of the lawn. A fence, and a gate. The gate would be open. Since this was Block 40 in the dark, and some people can't see well in the dark, the game could be spiced up a little by closing the gate. It was usually my brother that did that. And it was usually our friend Killian who then went smashing into it.

It was usually me who'd knock on the livingroom window and disturb the card players to tell them the curtains weren't properly closed and were letting out chinks of light. I liked the dark. Still do.

TRiG.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

Aha! And I've finally worked out why I couldn't log in from my home computer. The HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on is incompatible with MyOpenId. I've disabled the extension for now. Not happy with that, as it's a handy extension to have.

TRiG, now happily logged in.

[Brin]

TRiG: The other standard game was "wall-to-wall". We all line up against one wall. The person who's "it" parades no man's land in the middle, between the two walls, and calls out a colour. Anyone wearing that colour could proceed safely to the other side; anyone not so fortunate was at risk of being caught as they tried to cross.

I played something like that once at Girl Guides. You were supposed to pick a colour arbitrarily in your head (I suppose you could base it on your clothing if you wanted) and only run to the other side of the room if the caller picked that colour. (They trusted you not to wait until after the calling and pick your colour accordingly, and explicitly stated relatively obscure colours like periwinkle were not allowed.)

I never actually ran, because nobody ever chose black. ("Black's not a colour!" "Yes it is!")

[J. Random Scribbler]

TRiG, have you tried disabling the HTTPS Everywhere rule for MyOpenID? Look for it in the (ridiculously long) list in the HTTPS Everywhere preferences and click the green checkmark to disable it.

I don't use MyOpenID so I couldn't say if that works, just thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't found that list yet.

Also: Black is so a color!

[Nick Kiddle]

My sister and I played a game of our own devising at home where if a car passed in the (pretty quiet residential) street we had to be further back than the kitchen window or touching a wall or fence, otherwise we would be "killed". If we were caught in the open with no wall in reach, we could protect ourselves by running on the spot with our eyes closed and fingers crossed and holding our breath for a count of twenty. We played this on other streets around the village, choosing landmarks on each pedestrian path that marked the appropriate distance from the road, and constantly trailing our fingers on walls and fences in case a car came unexpectedly. When we played in the garden, we would jump up at the sound of an approaching car and shout "Touch the wall, touch the wall!" which was our response to the constraints of the game rather than one of the defined rules. That used to really annoy our parents.

[cjmr, who is HOME!, on her son's netbook]

"Someone would dip a finger twice in the "ink pot" formed in the centre if the shoes, then run round. I forget what the rhyme was. It wasn't the standard "eeny meeny miny moe" that was used in other situations. It may have been a process of elimination. "Ip dip it is not you," perhaps, though I feel there was more to it than that."

Was it: "Inky-dinky, bottle of ink! The cork fell out and YOU stink!" (for counting out)

[Froborr]

Our usual method of selecting "it" for games that required such was "Not it!" Someone would shout that, and everyone else would have to shout "Not it!" back and touch their nose. Last person to touch their nose was "it."

[gleomstapa]

We did something like that, only it was "Nose goes" - someone would say that, and the last person to touch their nose was it. In silence, so usually the least attentive person would wind up as "it."

Wallball was played against a wall sort of like tennis or squash, using a tennis ball, and if you (I think) let it bounce twice or dropped a catch (you could only catch it straight off the wall, no bounces) you had to run to the wall before someone hit the wall with the ball. Mostly boys played it, but some girls. Then there was Hallball, which was banned from camp after someone broke his own finger by stepping on it. The rules to that were rather more complicated, and I don't know them because I only heard about it secondhand.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

Inky-dinky, bottle of ink! The cork fell out and YOU stink!

No.

Hang on. I've remembered.

Ip dip sky blue: It is not you.

TRiG.

[cjmr, who is HOME!, on her son's netbook]

TRiG, yeah, we did that one, too.

I'm trying to remember how old I was before I figured out that which counting out rhyme the older girls chose to use depended on which person they wanted to be 'out' or 'it'...

[gleomstapa]

Ink, dink, you stink.

There was also bubblegum, bubblegum in a dish - how many pieces do you wish? and you'd count out the number that the person it landed on named.

[cjmr, who is HOME!, on her son's netbook]

Other counting out rhymes I remember are:

My mother and your mother were hanging out the clothes
My mother socked your mother right in the nose
What color was the blood?
(spell out the color given by indicated child) spells (color) and you are 'not it'!

AND

Engine, engine number 9
Riding the Chicago line
If the train should jump the track
Do you want your money back?
(spell out either 'no' or 'yes' as indicated) and you are 'not it'!

[Froborr]

Only one we had was "Eeny meenie miney mo." The debate raged eternally over whether you counted each syllable or each word.

[Timothy (TRiG)]

I can't remember whether it was mothers hanging out clothes or something else, but I do remember spelling out the colour of the blood.

This thread is fun!

TRiG.