Back in time...

(I was going to write about something different this morning, then I saw BigAlice's post).

Big Alice found her childhood sticker collection while helping clean out her mom's house.

Wow, the sight of those takes me back.

I know I've griped in the past about how the 70s - when I was really a kid - were pretty much a drought of good things, kid-wise (YES, there was Barbie, but as I've said before, I was always kind of suspicious of Barbie. And there was Lego, and the Fisher-Price stuff. But a lot of the cool toys seemed to come along when I was a tween and it was beginning to be not-cool to care about those kinds of toys. Even someone as admittedly not-cool as I was realized that).

But stickers were OK for tween girls. Oh, of course, the very COOLEST girls and the "bad girls" had progressed to collecting other things (Hickeys, maybe? ER visits? The big scandal of seventh grade was that a bunch of the "bad girls" tried to get high on diet pills and had to go to the emergency room and get their stomachs pumped...or at least that was the story that circulated.)

But looking at those stickers takes me back. Takes me back to the days of the packages of scratch-and-sniff stickers (there were a lot in a package, and if you were lucky, someone would be willing to trade some of your extras for ones you didn't have). I think Pizza and Chocolate and Root Beer were the favorite ones, but I also remember there was a gasoline (?) scented one, with a picture of a lawnmower on it. (And maybe "rubber tire," also). (And eventually the rumor got started that the scratch-and-sniff smells caused cancer. As did the strawberry smell on the Strawberry Shortcake dolls...there's something sociologically interesting there, I think, that the "OH NOES everything you enjoy will ruin your health" concept may have got started then...)

The real prizes though were the Lisa Frank stickers, or the Mrs. Grossman's stickers (She had the iconic teddy bear sticker). Her stickers came on big rolls that were held by a Plexiglas stand; you either cut or tore off the stickers you wanted.

Stickers were pretty cheap - like, a dime or a quarter a piece. (Maybe some of the bigger, more elaborate Mrs. Grossman's stickers that had multiple stickers to a piece were fifty cents, I don't remember). They were easy to store - most of us either bought or were given photo albums where we kept them. (Funny, but as BigAlice mentions, we never actually STUCK them to stuff....). They were kind of a social currency - a "new kid" could make friends pretty fast if she had a sticker collection and was willing to trade (bonus if she had stickers that other people didn't have).

(I don't know if boys collected stickers or not. I don't remember any of the boys I knew being into that. My brother had some, but then he was five years younger than I was and was kind of in the phase where he wanted to imitate what the older kids did, and it didn't matter as much if it was something that "boys didn't do." It's possible some of the boys DID collect stickers though - maybe focusing on the grosser of the scratch-and-sniff stickers)

I look at those, though, and I admit I feel a little sad...or maybe nostalgic. For a time when things that were so simple could be enjoyed with largely unalloyed pleasure (I was not very big on trading, but I do guess in some cases the trading could lead to High Drama. I mainly only traded stuff I had duplicates of...). It was just simple. And it was a cheap pleasure - even someone with as small of an allowance as I had could add a few new stickers to their collection on a fairly regular basis. And there was the hope and the excitement of hearing that there was a new shipment of Mrs. Grossman's coming in to the shop that had them.

I think of some of the other simple pleasures of being a child/tween: the penny candy that The Attic (a small gift shop in my town) sold. Smurfs (I didn't have as many of these; for one reason, my allowance was small, and for another, when they were first popular, they could be very hard to find - so having the intersection of Having Money and The Store Having Smurfs In Stock was rare). Those little plastic zoo or farm animals that you used to be able to buy in cellophane bags at places like the T G and Y*. Those little rubber-eraser animals that the Diener company made (A Google Image Search turns up a few examples. I had mostly the animals...that walrus and the anteater wearing a bowler hat and blazer are ones I remember).

(*One of the women in my Sunday School class once mentioned that they always referred to the T G and Y as "Turtles, Girdles, and Yo-Yos.")

And I wonder if maybe a lot of us aren't searching, as adults, for something that gives the same simple unalloyed pleasure as a book full of stickers. ("Everybody wants a rock to tie a piece of string around"?).