This reminds me of the times we decorated bikes and spruced up pets for the local school Fair. It was, of course, in the days before meltdowns and temper tantrums if you didn’t win a prize! A time when it was simply fun, we knew there would be “winners” but we never felt like losers. I know my brothers dragged along a calf at least once to enter in the Best Pet competition, our dog just wasn’t into that kind of thing.
Crepe paper was the best for decorating bikes but if you got it wet the dye was ferocious. It also reminds me of our penchant for using a peg to clip a piece of cardboard beside the spokes so it made a lovely clapping sound as the edge caught when the wheel turned. We used silver foil milk bottle tops folded around individual spokes to make a fancy pattern. At Christmas the bottle tops were red and green so they were really in demand.
I wonder if it was the same in other parts of the world.
Musings of a Retiring Person 
I grew up in South Africa, and we also used to clip cardboard near the wheels so the spokes made a flappy noise!
Wow! That’s amazing. There’s so much travel these days and with the Internet ideas spread as quickly across the world as they do to the next neighbourhood but how did fads come about and then spread all those years ago?