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

GAMES
Imaginative Games
Playing Store
When I was a little kid we usually played in the sand. We gathered cans and put them on 
little tables. That’s what we call the store.
I always liked to be the store keeper. We used rocks for money and sometimes we stole 
money from our mother or father. I usually said that a can of pop cost one dollar. The 
things that we sold were expensive.

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68 Children’s 
Folklore
I made cookies and bread out of mud. Some of my little brothers and sisters ate the 
mud. I told them not to eat it, but they did.
Cecelia Begaye, a freshman at Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, 
Utah, wrote this description for the 1971 school publication 
A Look at Me: Writ-
ings
(12), kept in the Fife Folklore Archives of Utah State University.
One popular role-playing game for young children is playing store, which lets 
children imitate consumer practices while giving them the chance to make a little 
money. Cecelia’s description shows that it can be fun to make familiar foods out 
of mud. This is a creative variation on the old custom of making mud pies of dirt, 
berries, and other materials that are available outdoors.
Keeping House
We didn’t play at keeping house on the “mothers and fathers” principle, instead we 
invented a reason for the father being away. Sometimes he was a lumberjack, sometimes 
away on business or on holiday. If there happened to be a boy playing with us—which was 
very rare—he always played father, never mother, but since the woman was in charge at 
home the father used to be sent out to go shopping or to chaperone the children.
This description of the traditional game of “house” came from a Finnish girl; 
it was published in Leea Virtanen’s 
Children’s Lore
in 1978 (31). Virtanen suggests 
Boys pretend to cook leaves in their New York City clubhouse in the late 1970s. Photograph 
by Martha Cooper.

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Examples and Texts 69
that to young players of this game, “The mother represents adult power, a caring 
but at the same time, tyrannical master” (31). In 
Children’s Games in Street and 
Playground,
the Opies make the point that “In domestic dramas the male role is 
not a popular one; in some young eyes (an East Dulwich 10-year-old’s, for ex-
ample) the father is little more than a figure of fun” (331–32).
Wind Tunnel
In my family’s summer cottage the upstairs bedrooms were cooled by a large fan in the 
hallway. The three of us would take heavy blankets and attach them to the floor to create 
a wind tunnel. In this wind world we would play with our cars and trucks, but the biggest 
thing to do was wind talk. To wind talk you put your face right next to the fan and talk 
into it. When heard from the other side, the voice sounds all distorted and wobbly. This 
was a really cool thing to do on hot summer days.
Alan, a Scottish American college student from Long Island, recorded his 
memories of imaginative play with his two brothers in the winter of 1979. In this 
secluded “wind world,” Alan and his brothers created a mode of speech that dif-
fered intriguingly from ordinary conversation. Instead of manipulating syllables, 
as most secret languages do, “wind talk” involved voice distortion. Twenty-three 
years later, the movie 
Windtalkers
(2002) documented Navajo soldiers’ use of 
their native language to create a secret code in World War II.