Have You Ever Wondered?

Merry Christmas everyone. Well, for most of you (if you are not Russian), that should be merry belated Christmas anyway. Hope you enjoyed the break in whatever secular and/or religous way you saw fit. And of course, hopefully you have not bought into the bastardisation of the symbolic birth of Jesus Christ and the spirit of sharing time with your loved ones by actually buying presents, and thereby feeding the exponentially growing beast that is the commercial interests of the unwelcome capitalist system.

Anyway…

My question today is : why do all ice cream trucks/vans/motorcycles, or rather, why does the ice-cream man (the driver is always a man it seems) play the same song? Everyone knows the song. In fact, its been made to a Christmas song as well, so you should have heard it played recently if you’d been paying attention to the carols (instead of donating your money to rich capitalist-scum traders).

The title to the song in question, is of course, ‘Greensleaves’, and the Christmas carol which uses the same tune (but different lyrics) is ‘What child is this’.

It’s a song everyone associates with ice cream. As soon as kiddies hear it, they become organised in a chaotic kind of way; they instinctively drop whatever they are doing, fetch the house keys, while looking left and right, open the door and bolt out towards the gate while there is always one particular member of the kiddies gang who goes find an adult while yelling ‘mommy mommy ice-cream ice-cream!!!!’. And then amazingly no matter how many kids there are (I had many many cousins),  it seemed that no two kids ordered the same ice cream. The adults of course, who were probably playing mah-jong or something before, don’t hesistate in paying 1 ringgit per kid to get them to shut up and stop fighting for 15 minutes. It always works. But then again, 15 minutes sometimes gets cut short to 5 minutes, especially when one of the older kiddies steals one of the younger kiddies’s ice cream (heh heh). Or, when one of the silly younger kiddies drops their just unwrapped ice cream on the floor (heh heh again).

Ah, such raw emotion. The excitement. The joy. It’s the same, in many countries all around the world (eg. Malaysia, Australia, scum-sucking U.S, Iran, Lebanon, Indonesia - or so people have told me) - the power of one particular tune, of one particular song. Silly kiddies.

Now, where’s my paddle pop?