What game is Nanny describing here? In the U.S. we have a jumprope game “Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief” – the assumption being you’ll grow up to be whatever you say when you miss a skip. But how would that translate to cherry stones? Wouldn’t you just have as many stones as you’ve eaten cherries?
Pp. 133-135 discusses “naming ceremonies” for new babies, and appropriate presents. Is this a British custom? (In the U.S. we have “baby showers” with presents but they’re usually given before the baby is born; no presents accompany a christening or baptism.)
P. 148 is on “First Footing”:
Is this in reference to some British Christmas or New Year’s custom?
The first footing thing is mainly Scottish - the first person to come into the house after midnight on New Year’s Eve (known as “Hogmanay” in Scotland), should, ideally, for good luck for the coming year be a tall dark man. He should bring with him a lump of coal (signifying warmth, I suppost, not too sure), and nowadays people don’t much bother with the coal, but bring whisky and shortbread, which taste nicer than coal.
stangely, I’m not aware of any requirement for the first foot to be a tall dark handsome man, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.
I don’'t think I can remember how the cherry stone thing is meant to work.
From my recollections (such as they are) of Hogmanay, if you can still taste the difference between coal and shortbread by midnight, you haven’t been drinking nearly enough whisky …
It’s an old game you play when you’re eating a cherry tart or cherry pie or whatever. You count the number of stones in your piece, and for each stone, you go down the rhyme. When you run out of stones, that’s what you’re going to grow up to be. Virginia Woolf refers to it in her novel “Between the Acts”
It was a cherry counting rhyme before it was a skipping rhyme. It comes from one of the Winnie The Pooh books by A.A. Milne. The poem is actually called Cherry Stones.
IIRC in the original it was ‘ploughboy’ instead of ‘beggar man.’
What game is Nanny describing here? In the U.S. we have a jumprope game “Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief” – the assumption being you’ll grow up to be whatever you say when you miss a skip. But how would that translate to cherry stones? Wouldn’t you just have as many stones as you’ve eaten cherries?