According to the message she wrote on the back of the card, these rubber duckies are quite popular in Finland.
These rubber duck toys were becoming very popular thanks to Ernie in the children's tv show Sesame Street, who has one of these that he names Rubber Duckie. There's 3 different songs that he did about his rubber duck, I'm sure they're somewhere no youtube. Although if you have small children, there's a good chance that your head is already filled with all manner of Sesame Street songs anyway (like mine is).
Back then in the early 70's, the ducks were the standard yellow billed ducks, the "original" duckies. Nowadays you can find them in all kinds of colors and types. There's purple or red "evil" duckies with little devil horns, there's stripped, plaid and polka dotted ones, there's even black ones that float upside down pretending to be dead. And then of course the whole slew of holiday themed ones with red scarves, reindeer antlers, bunny ears, etc,...
What surprised me more than all the colors and patterns, is that there's such a thing as Ducky Derbies or rubber duck races. I had never heard of these until I (yes, you guessed it) consulted Wikipedia. There's a ton of these races all over the world, a lot of times to raise money for a certain cause. In this case, people pay to sponsor a duckie and then at the end of the day they dump all the duckies in a waterway and the person who sponsored the first duckie to cross the finish line wins a prize. Come to think of it, this might be a fun idea if you live near a creek or something and are looking for a fun game to do at your kids' birthday party. But in these "professional" races, there's a LOT of duckies competing! In the U.S., the largest of these races is the annual Freestore Foodbank Rubber Duck Regatta in Cincinnatti, OH with over 100,000 duckies racing. Since its start in 1994 the organization has raised over $ 4 million with these races. Not shabby at all me thinks.
I also found out about another fun rubber duck related story. In January 1992, a shipping container carrying almost 29,000 Friendly Floatees (a children's bath toy by The First Years, Inc.) in 4 different shapes (red beavers, green frogs, blue turtles and yellow duckies) were washed overboard when the ship they were being transported on got caught in a big storm. Somehow the container opened, and with the seawater the cardboard backings of the toys disintegrated, leaving all these rubber floaties to just drift in the ocean (since they have no holes in the bottom, the water doesn't get inside the toys).
These floatees have travelled all over the world so far, at least over the world they can reach by water.After 3 months, a lot of these were found along the coastlines of Indonesia, Australia and South America. About 10 months later some of these floatees started washing ashore in Alaska and Japan. Many of the ducks got trapped in the Arctic ice, which they moved through very slowly as the ice moved (about a mile a day) and were sighted in the North Atlantic in 2000. A lot of them were found in 2004 in New England, Canada and Iceland. In 2007 some of these toys made landfall on the Southwestern shores of the United Kingdom.
Donovan Hohn wrote a book about this in 2011 called " Moby-Duck, the true story of 28,800 bath toys lost at sea" Pin It
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