Prompt: Did your family have any back-to-school traditions when you were growing up? Were you generally eager or reluctant to start school? Was buying school supplies a big deal or did you order them through the school? Were there any school supplies you particularly loved?…
Some homeschooling families greet the coming school year with great fanfare, purchasing new materials and taking “first day” photos. Others do school year-round and never have a real “first day” of school.
And some, like my family, have a first day of school, but don’t make much of a fuss about it.
In fact, we made so little fuss that I can’t remember a single thing about any of my baker’s dozen first days of school (until college–but that’s a whole ‘nother story!)
That’s not to say that I don’t remember any of the circumstances surrounding “back-to-school.”
I remember going to the packed out back-to-school sales and perusing the completely unreasonable lists all those others schools had for their students. We didn’t get backpacks and lunchbags and fancy binders and pencil cases and the like. We got milk crates to store our school books in (since we’d usually destroyed our old crates, having carted them around the house and indeed the state during the previous school year)–but that was about the only thing that was distinct for each student. Otherwise, we stocked up huge piles of notebooks, notebook paper (in wide and college rules), handwriting tablets, yellow wooden pencils, and erasers.
In the olden days, Lincoln’s tax was $0.065 per dollar–and it rounded down from the half. So if you bought something that cost exactly one dollar, you’d be charged $1.06. But if you bought two things that cost exactly one dollar, you’d be charged $2.13. One year, there was something that cost exactly one dollar, and each of us kids went through the checkout with our one item. The checkout lady tried in vain to convince us to combine our purchase (instead of passing the leftover cash to the next kid in line.) We tried in vain to explain to her that we could save three whole cents by doing it our way. (We definitely knew how to pinch our pennies!)
And I remember Mom reminiscing about her own school days. Every so often, we kids would complain about how we’d been deprived of this supply or that–how we had to share our school supplies or whatever. And when we complained, Mom might tell her story:
When she was a little girl, the fourth of twelve children, she got just what was on the list and nothing else. The list decreed that each child had to have a set of eight crayons (red, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, black, and brown.) And so Mom had a set of eight crayons. All the other children came to school with their sets of twenty-four. There was nothing she could do about it–her family was poor, they had what was required.
We, of course, never lacked for crayons. There was always an enormous bucket of partially used crayons around the house that we could use at any time. And if we needed nice, unbroken crayons, we could always borrow from Mom’s set–for every year, Mom bought herself a shiny new box of crayons, the biggest box that could be bought.
From left to right: Timothy (age 3) with his preschool workbook, John (age 4) with his art book, Grace (age 1) with someone else’s workbook, Daniel (age 6) with a Boxcar children mystery from the library, and Me (age 10) with some large tome also from the library (I’m guessing it’s either a history or a work of fiction–that’s a pretty big book!)
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