Friday, October 11, 2013

Something I'd forgotten

Today, on the campus homepage, they were advertising a kids' coloring contest of our new mascot. (A bison. We've changed names on the past 10 years because of NCAA stuff about Native groups and demeaning names, and we also dropped our old mascot of the Spirit Pony....I kind of wish we still had a pony mascot, because our colors are blue and gold, and I'd be able to think of it as a Wondercolt. But a bison is still pretty cool)

Anyway, I realized I hadn't thought of coloring contests in YEARS. They used to be really common when I was a kid. You colored in a picture (usually something that sort of advertised the sponsor, or something seasonal - I remember doing ones of the Easter Bunny, for example). The best coloring job in each age category got some small prize. (I never won. That bothered me a bit, but then, it was an early introduction to "There's always someone better than you are at stuff, and there's always someone worse than you")

I was surprised to see the coloring contest offered, I guess I assumed they had been a casualty of the computer age - that kids didn't color any more. Or maybe a casualty of "we don't want to upset the kids who don't win," I don't know.

I was thinking of other stuff I remember as a kid that are less common now.

One thing I think of is the cheapie Christmas stockings some places used to do - some of the coffeeshops in the area where I grew up used to have small stockings made out of like that onion-sack material, with a few cheap toys in it (for years, a couple of the "tub toys" came out of those stockings). I can't remember if they were Breakfast with Santa prizes, or if the places just gave them out to kids during the holiday season.

(Come to think of it - Breakfast with Santa, at least in its full downtown-department-store glory, is probably a thing of the past. We used to do it when I was a kid - drive down to the old downtown Akron O'Neil's and have a Saturday breakfast in their dining room with lots of other families, and Santa would come and walk around the tables and meet and greet, and the idea was then after the breakfast you went to "Santa's Wonderland" or whatever the store called the little walk-through area with displays of animated figures set up. Usually it culminated in seeing Santa, and either sitting on his lap for a photo (my parents have a whole series of photos-with-Santa - first just me, and then me with my brother - for six or seven years of my childhood) or at least getting to tell him what you wanted for Christmas)

One of the malls - Chapel Hill - had Archie, an enormous snowman (like, a couple stories tall, as I remember it) whose eyes lit up. I suppose it was terrifying to some children but I don't remember ever being frightened of things like that or Santa or the other benign figures of childhood.

I'm trying to think of other departed things.

My grandmother had some small towels and washcloths she got out of detergent boxes, which was a thing once, but that may have been before my time, and she just told me about it.

And prizes in the cereal boxes. That's rare these days; more often the "prize" is "double points for our scheme to slightly fund schools in return for your buying our stuff" or some kind of code for an online thing. Which just doesn't seem as fun and real to me as a little plastic parachute man or a figurine of the cereal's spokescreature or even a minipack of crayons....

We rarely got "sugar" cereal in my household so the prizes were doubly precious and usually argued over. (Then, many years later, when I lived in a dorm in college, I realized: being the first person down for breakfast on the day that new cereal boxes were out has its privileges. They had one of the Cap'n Crunch brand cereals, and for about 2 months, there were little Cap'n Crunch figures packed IN BETWEEN the box and the liner - so I didn't even have to pour out a lot of cereal, I could just slide my hand between the bag and the box, and I acquired a lot of little Cap'n Crunches and "Soggies" (which were excellent because they glowed in the dark) that way. I gave some away to my later-rising friends, but I felt the perk of getting the prize belonged to me, as I was the first one up and in the cafeteria.

I admit, I've occasionally bought a cereal I might otherwise not eat because of the enticement of a prize. But again, they've become vanishingly rare, probably a casualty of leaner corporate budgets and the higher cost of plastics. And maybe the decline of kids eating sweetened cereal? It seems that every 'sweet cereal' ad I see now shows the kids eating it, not for breakfast, but to refuel after some kind of strenuous athletic activity. (And I thought "exercising until you 'earn' your food" was considered a disordered behavior, eating-wise).

I will say I've often lamented that the healthful sort of cereals adults "should" eat should have really cool prizes in them. (And I mean really cool TOY prizes, like those little parachute men or a tiny catapult, not adult-themed prizes like office supplies)

(And allegedly McDonald's is going to do a run of Happy Meals where there's a book on healthful eating as the "prize." Um. I bet they see the demand for their meals decline during that. And I learned that some McDonald's will SELL you the prize without food purchase, for like 50 cents or something. Or at least they used to....)

One thing I was surprised recently to see still existed (though maybe another company has bought out the name) is Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. This was like a proto-lip gloss for girls. (It was more like Chapstick, but the fact that it was scented and flavored pushed it over into pre-cosmetic territory in many mom's minds. Or at least, in my mom's mind). This was one of the things that the "cool girls" had....and had multiples of. And used to use ostentatiously. And those of us who didn't have as much pocket money, and who had parents who were maybe stricter about our purchases (though now I wonder: WOULD my parents have forbidden it if I had wanted it?) just watched them.

Other things that still exist: Hello Kitty (still going strong after some 35+ years), stickers (wow, a couple years of my childhood, sticker collections were THE thing), Ocean Pacific (Though I think another company owns the name now - OP were THE cool t-shirts to own in the mid to late 80s).

Anything you can think of (especially fellow gen-Xers) that were common when you were a kid and don't seem to exist now?

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