Tree Home Game

Informant Data:

Dylan Mao was born on October 13th of 1998 in New York City. When she was very young her family relocated to Brooklyn where she lived until moving away for college. Dylan is an only child but she grew up playing with same close-knit group of childhood friends for many years, as they all attended the same private school from kindergarten through high school. During the fall and spring seasons Dylan’s mother would take her and her childhood friends to Prospect Park after school on days when Dylan did not have after-school activities like soccer practice or rehearsals for the school’s musical theater program. At the park they would get ice cream and then play until dinnertime. In the summertime, Dylan would also play in Prospect Park every afternoon after attending various day camps. Dylan is now a second-year undergraduate student at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania where she studies French and education.

Contextual Data:

I spoke with Dylan on May 15th of 2019 when she came to visit Dartmouth College’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire upon completing her spring term at Gettysburg. She shared this story as part of a Folklore collection for Russian 13. When I asked Dylan about her favorite childhood backyard game, she immediately brought up what she calls “the tree home game.”  The game involved access to a park with clusters of nearby trees. While Dylan remembers playing many outdoor games with various groups of children and in various locations, she played this specific game only with one group of kids—a group of five of her closest elementary school friends who functioned almost like siblings for her. This group of children created the game together while playing in Prospect Park after school one day in June (Dylan believes it was the last day of first grade). It was played frequently that summer and during the subsequent summers. Dylan also mentioned that this game was almost always played in the surrounding area of a particular meadow in Prospect Park. Additionally, although this game was played by children growing up in a city, it required access to a large outdoor park and is thus more similar in nature to popular American suburban children’s games than to children’s games associated with urban culture.

Item:

The “tree home game” is usually played with at least three children. Each child participant has a few minutes to select their favorite tree, which is then considered their “home” for the duration of the game. After each participant selects his or her tree, all of the children playing the game then gather together again and take turns visiting each child’s “home.” In order to properly visit each home, all of the children playing must climb each given tree. Once everyone has successfully climbed or gathered around the tree, the particular child who picked it out then gives the other children a “tour” of their tree home. Participants also usually engage in a pretend dinner party at each tree home.

Collector’s Comments:

When I asked Dylan about the emotions associated with this game, she recalled that sometimes tensions among the child participants would arise when multiple kids wanted to select the same tree to be their “home.” She remarked that usually such an issue was settled by a game of “rock-paper-scissors,” which resonated with me in particular. Using “rock-paper-scissors” as a way to settle issues that came up during play dates is something I did all the time as a child (whether the issue revolved around deciding who was going to be “it” for a game of tag or hide-and-seek, or deciding who got to pick out what game was being played in the first place).

Collector’s Name: Ella Ketchum ‘21