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

Spin the Bottle
Well, I have gone to lots of parties where everybody plays this game, but I don’t like to 
play. I’m kind of going out with Jerry and he’s in the seventh grade, so he wouldn’t be at 
the parties. Anyway, you have to get a Coke bottle that 
must
be from the party. Then you 
sit in a circle or else near each other in a group. One person takes the bottle and spins it. 

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78 Children’s 
Folklore
Wherever it lands, you have to kiss that person. Usually if it is someone you don’t like, you 
sort of stall, hoping everyone won’t make you kiss them. But most of the time you have 
to kiss because they make you.
Thirteen-year-old Maureen told her older sister, Melissa, about playing Spin the 
Bottle in Mahopac, New York, in April 1987. At first, Maureen hesitated to talk 
about the game. After Melissa explained that she had played Spin the Bottle too, 
Maureen felt better about describing her own experience. Their family heritage was 
Irish American.
In his survey of Ohio children’s and college students’ kissing games in 1959, Brian 
Sutton-Smith found that Spin the Bottle was the most popular game. He observes 
that children often cheat so that they can kiss the person of their choice (467–80). 
Mary and Herbert Knapp note that games of this kind “excuse a child from selecting 
a partner (a most onerous task for younger children) and eliminate the possibility 
of being deliberately left out” (219). Perhaps this inclusivity explains why Spin the 
Bottle is still played in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
Pass the Card
Take a card of some kind, maybe an ID or a credit card—but kids don’t have credit cards. 
Hold the card in your mouth with suction and then pass it to the next person, to their 
mouth, and they have to use suction to hold it. The game goes guy/girl, guy/girl. The 
point of the game is not to drop the card, but if someone drops it, he has to kiss the person 
he drops it with. The whole point is to kiss somebody.
Robert, a 22-year-old college student of Anglo-American descent, explained 
this game’s rules to me in Vestal, New York, in August 2007. He had watched 
middle-school friends play the game between 1998 and 2000.
Although the use of a plastic ID card gives this kissing game a contemporary 
flair, the game is quite old. In 
Games and Songs of American Children,
William 
Wells Newell identifies a game in which a button or whisper is passed around a 
circle (151). Brian Sutton-Smith lists three versions of the game in “Kissing Games 
of Adolescents in Ohio”: Pass the Kiss, Pass the Lifesaver, and Pass the Orange 
(476). Late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century variants of this game 
include passing compact discs and straws from mouth to mouth. The “guy/girl, 
guy/girl” lineup ensures that some interesting kisses or near-kisses will take place.
Dangerous Games