“Someone ding-dong ditched!” she called out as she closed the door. Turns out the doorbell chime was the washer telling us a load was done, but the description used by my stepdaughter intrigued me. “Ding-dong ditch” is a phrase I had heard before, about a decade ago when my daughter and son were that age. But even then, that phrase caught me off-guard because, when I grew up, we often rang a bell or knocked on a door and ran away — but we called it “nicky-nicky nine door.” Those were the halcyon days of the 1970s and 1980s in the Fraser Valley and I had never heard “ding-dong ditch” until moving to Kamloops in 2005.