Ginga

So apparently it was “Hug a ginga day” last Friday. We were made aware of this when Jayla’s ballet teacher – a fellow ginga – approached her after class with arms outstretched. Miss Three accepted the embrace but continued to look baffled until she asked me the reason for the hug later in the car.

“Well today is a special day for people with orange hair like you,” I explained. (It is orange and I’m sticking to that). “Some people call people with orange hair “gingas” because it’s another word for ginger and that is the colour of your hair.”

I then suggested she give her nana – another fellow “red head” and probably the source of her own – a hug when she saw her later that day.

As far as I can remember the word ginga was coined in the late nineties as yet another way to take the mickey out of red heads. Around this time mullets also became a hair style to mock.

I’m ashamed to say my university friends and I jumped on this bandwagon and I seem to recall us purchasing ginga wigs, which we subsequently chopped into mullets and donned before spending the good part of a Friday carrying out a pub crawl around Hamilton.

Karma caught up years later as, funnily enough, most of us went on to either marry a ginga or have ginga children.

Equally funny, the ginga jokes dried up about then.

Some people take it too far, such as the Facebook “friend” whose sometimes misguided wit led him to post a photo on my wall of a conservation sign stating “Kill the wild ginger.”

In actual fact, redheads make up just two per cent of the global population and, according to some scientists, are threatened with extinction.

Some gingas call themselves gingas, some take offense, others are bemused. If you are a ginga it probably doesn’t pay to Google it. One of the more euphemistic explanations reads as follows:

“A normal human being that just happens to be born with red hair, a lot of freckles, and white skin. They are not some sort of creature they are normal people. They live in houses! Not burrows. They aren't the result of some weird disease. They were just born with red hair, freckles, and white skin! Men find them prettier and more exotic! They are typically smarter!”

My little "Ginga"

I tend to agree with this, although judging by the amount of exclamation marks I’d say it was probably written by a ginga.

It’s early days but my little carrot top may have escaped the freckles that often go hand in hand with auburn hair – her skin is more olive than her two little white-boy brothers. But besides, she’s proud of her copper locks:

Later, on “hug a ginga day” she raced up to her nana and declared: “Happy orange day!”