I am 38 years old. And for all of those past 38 years, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why Little Jackie Paper brought Puff the Magic Dragon “strings and ceiling wax and other fancy stuff.” This has honestly bugged me for ages and has been revisited recently now that Doodles is into Peter, Paul and Mary. What the heck is “ceiling wax”? Why would a little boy have ceiling wax?
It wasn’t until I recently reread, “The time has come, to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot–and whether pigs have wings,” (said the Walrus) that a little bell went ding, ding, ding in my head.
Sealing wax. Not that that makes a ton of sense still, but it certainly makes more sense than ceiling wax, given that sealing wax is an actual thing.
Also, for the record, it’s only in the past month that I realized that Jackie and Puff don’t frolic in the autumness, but in the autumn mist. That bugged me, too (how does one frolic in “autumness”?), but not as much as ceiling wax. (While we’re at it, what kind of children’s song is this anyway? Poor Puff, all alone and neglected, withering away in his cave. Is this the happy ending our children need to hear?)
