During my fruitless efforts to locate my old camp picture, I
stumbled upon my old sticker books.
When I was a kid, stickers were all the rage. Girls were passionate about their stickers
(maybe there were some boys who were passionate about stickers, aside from the
kind you put on your skateboard, but I never met one). And I’m not talking, hey
there’s a sticker and I’ll wear it on my shirt how fun, it was more like, if
you even think about stealing my fuzzy lion sticker, don’t lie I see it in your
eyes, I will cut you. I could spend
hours organizing my stickers and designing my pages. It was the perfect way for my parents to get
me to accompany them on long boring shopping trips, well either the promise of
stickers or the promise of candy worked equally well.
There were various categories of stickers...
There were puffy stickers
There were fuzzy stickers
There were stickers with your name on them, though they weren't the best because they were hard to trade unless someone happened to have the same name as you
There were stickers with your favorite cartoon characters
There were the always popular glittery stickers
And my absolute favorite, the scratch-n-sniff
If you had a giant sticker that took up most of a page no matter what the sticker was of, you were pretty much the coolest. If it was of a giant rainbow unicorn heart, well I'm sorry I'm so awesome, don't be jealous.
The very best days were the ones when your friends would come
over and bring their stickers and you would spend hours bartering and
trading. You would say things like,
“The iridescent
butterfly with the liquid stuff inside that moves when you touch it? Oh, that’s
worth at least two sheets of scratch-n- sniff and one sheet of fuzzy unicorns."
Maybe the kids these days have fun spending time trading virtual stickers,
but my heart does feel a little sad that most kids now will never know the
pleasures of a newly opened pack of scratch-n- sniffs or know the joys of
trading a page of Garfield for a page of glittery butterflies. They were fun times, fun times indeed.
Two notes: 1) This is my 100th Blog post. Yay me! 2) It always miffed me that the Garbage Pail Kid Sara Slime spelled her name without the h.
Those Scratch-N-Sniff stickers were earth shattering, game-changers in the eighties.
ReplyDeleteHappy 100th!
Happy 100th post!
ReplyDeleteAnd, funny thing, I'm pretty sure I have most of those stickers in a box somewhere. Oh, the 80s...