Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Ball Games
Since folk ball games require very little equipment—just a ball and, in some 
cases, a stick or another object—they are easy to play. William Wells Newell de-
votes a chapter of his 
Games and Songs of American Children
(1883) to ball games, 
including “Base-ball,” “Hand-ball,” “Stool-ball,” and “Hat-ball” (175–93). Newell 
views ball games as belonging to boys, but Norman Douglas’s London Street 
Games (1916/1931) lists many ball games played by both boys and girls: Round-
ers, Head Game, Daggles, and Broken Bottle, among others. 
Iona and Peter Opie explain that in games such as Ball Tag or Ball He, the 
ball “becomes an extension of the chaser” (
Children’s Games
73). Besides making 
it easier to tag someone, a ball can get someone’s attention quickly. William Wells 
Newell describes the popular game of Call-ball, in which a boy throws a ball 
against a house while calling out another player’s name (181). This game resem-
bles the contemporary game of Spud, in which the child whose number is called 
tries to hit the closest player with the ball.

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De
fi
nitions and Classi
fi
cations 35
For urban children, ball games on sidewalks and in vacant lots have become 
cherished traditions. New York City’s street game culture began in the mid-
nineteenth century, when crowded city blocks left little room for play. Two pop-
ular ball games were Stoopball, played on a building’s front steps or stoop, and 
Stickball, played in a street, parking lot, or schoolyard with a ball and a broom-
stick (Dargan and Zeitlin 10 – 86).
Changing seasons bring different kinds of ball games. Winter involves snow-
ball games and snowball fights, while summer offers a rich variety of games with 
large and small balls. Indoor ball games such as Ping-Pong become more exciting 
when a balloon takes the place of the usual ping-pong ball and the rules change to 
suit the players. Hockey, usually played in a rink or on a street with a ball or puck, 
develops a new dimension of wonder when played indoors with frozen Cornish 
hens replacing pucks. Children’s creativity continually seeks exciting variants of 
familiar pursuits.
Boy/Girl Games
Folklorists have studied children’s and adolescents’ kissing games since the 
nineteenth century. Other games that focus on interaction between boys and girls 
have received less attention. Because this domain includes games such as Truth 
Girl plays ball in Innsbruck, Austria, in the summer of 
1992. Photograph by Geoffrey Gould.

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36 Children’s 
Folklore
or Dare that focus on interactions other than kissing, the term 
boy/girl games
is 
used here.
Alice Bertha Gomme’s 
Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland 
 
includes examples of late nineteenth-century kissing games. In Kiss in the Ring, 
for example, a child walks around a ring of players. Dropping a handkerchief 
behind one child means that the child will get a kiss if he or she can catch the 
dropper of the handkerchief (1: 305–10).
Brian Sutton-Smith’s “The Kissing Games of Adolescents in Ohio” (1972) 
offers detailed analysis of such popular games as Spin the Bottle, Post Office, 
Winks, Mistletoe Kissing, and Necking. Sutton-Smith explains that traditional 
kissing games “provide a guarantee of certain gratifications, in this case relation-
ship with the opposite sex, but they place limitations upon excess” (489). Games 
such as Biting the Apple and Passing the Orange give children a chance to touch 
lips briefly while performing a ridiculous task. Mary and Herbert Knapp describe 
a variety of kissing games in