Oh the joys of surplus food!! The peanut butter (and I call it that with trepidation) was so hard you needed a pickaxe to get it out of the container. We never had fresh cow's milk..only powdered milk that came from bags. Same with eggs, they came dehydrated in bags. Any one else remember the awesome cans of pork (again, not sure it could be called that) that were only identifiable by the black image of a pig on the front of the can? There were no boxes of sugary cereals with prizes in the bottom. Only big clear bags of unidentified flakes. As a poor kid you didn't invite friends over to eat. You escaped as often as you could to a friend's house and ate real food....like Little Debbie Snack Cakes.
Horrifying jeans that had pleather patches at the knees to make them last longer. Wait..not just that, they said HUSKY in big bold lettering on the back pockets because I was a chubby kid.
We got two new outfits a year. One for Easter Sunday and one for school. These jeans were the bane of my existence. They were not only unfashionable, they were indestructible! I remember sliding on our stone driveway on my knees trying to ruin them in hopes of getting something else. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is for a 12 year old girl to have to wear these?! Thanks, Grandma for allowing me to wear pants that announced to the world that I was fat and "husky".
Christmas time.. I so badly wanted to believe in Santa Claus. I couldn't understand why everyone in my class always talked about getting toys and games and I got a stocking with pennies in the toe, along with an orange and maybe some chocolate. I remember a couple of years that our presents arrived in garbage bags left on our doorstep.. those were awesome years! I later found out that it was the Arctic League who had done that. Let's not forget that I was born in an era where pennies really didn't amount to much... it's not like it was the 1800's, when a handful of pennies was a huge treat! The most I was able to get was two hot balls. Yippee fricken skippy!
Don't think for a minute that I owned shoes like this! Anybody else remember calling cheap, out of style shoes 'cat heads'? When you are poor, you get used to wearing popular clothes years after they were popular. Only when they started showing up in thrift shops did you MAYBE have a chance of getting something that was once considered fashionable. As a poor kid, you didn't care if you were out of date. You seized the opportunity to wear once stylish clothing if it became available. I had a favorite pair of leg warmers that I got long after the trend was over. I didn't care that I looked like a poorly put together Jane Fonda, five years after the fact..
A bike was my best friend. I remember getting a banana seat bicylce about 5 years after they were huge. It was rusted and discolored..but it was mine. A bike meant freedom. I left at sun up and didn't come back until dark. I can thank my out dated and dangerously old bike for many knee scars and butt rashes that the plastic seat gave me in the summer.
Generic toys. On the off chance that you were lucky enough to get a new toy..you can bet your bottom dollar that it was a knock off of the real thing. Ever played with a fake Barbie Doll? If you have, you know that their heads snapped off if you looked at them wrong. Their hair always stuck on in an awful, unchangeable style..that you would always end up cutting. Not only did you NEVER want to look like one of these dolls, you hated them for existing. I wont even get started on fake legos.....
Hot summer days with no plastic pool. You learned to enjoy a garden hose..that is, until your grandmother caught you "wasting water" and would yell to turn it off. Seriously, I wanted a plastic pool so badly. If I saw one in a yard, it beckoned me like an oasis in the desert. I had images in my mind of sliding down the 12 inch built in slide and splashing like I was in a swimsuit photo shoot. Alas, we never had one. Totally surprised I never got some crazy illness from drinking from the rusty end of a garden hose.
Terrible Halloween costumes. I was a sheet ghost for many years. Another popular costume of mine was the hobo. It consisted of one of my grandfathers flannel shirts and some dirt smeared on my face. I didn't care..it was that wonderful candy that I got to have only a couple times a year that I was after. We won't discuss how many times I fell flat on my face from tripping over the sheet...safety was never a big priority in our house.
Slicing ice cream rather than scooping it.
I honestly did not know that scooping ice cream was an actual thing. I remember being old enough to go to a friends and watching them pull out a strange looking device that scooped it and being completely amazed. We rarely got stuff like ice cream, but when we did..it was sliced. Two bigger slices for the adults and equal smaller slices for the kids. That's just the way it was done. Ever try to eat sliced ice cream on a plate? It just slides around and mocks you while you drool over it.
Everyone laughed when Miley Cyrus cut her hair in a style that looked like she went at it with a weed whacker. Me..well it just made me think about all the horrible hair cuts I had as a kid. Whether it was a family member who swore they knew what they were doing, or me doing it..I had many.. MANY bad haircuts. I think the best was when I tried to cut my own bangs. Instead of achieving the popular look I was going for, I ended up looking like a monk who escaped a monastery in search for heroin.
There you have it. Wonderful memories of a poor kid. I don't regret a minute of it. In fact..I laughed out loud several times while writing this. There's something about growing up as a poor kid that makes being an adult even more awesome. You certainly never take cracking real eggs into a pan for granted.
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