Anymore, this is really just a saying. When was the last time any of us really took pen or pencil to paper and wrote someone a letter? I would bet that we all have written a bunch of letters in our time. The obligatory thank you letters to grandmas, grandpas and in-laws for Christmas and birthday gifts; the letters to Santa Claus asking for all those special gifts; most of us even wrote letters to some elected official as part of our schooling.
As I shared, I’ve been going through some old boxes. I ran across a bunch of letters and was reading them to my daughter. I read one where my brother wrote to me when I was in college and asked me to forgive him for peeling out in my Camaro. You see, he had dropped me off at a friend’s house whom I was riding back to school with, and had shown off in my car as he left and broke the tires loose. (It was a sweet car!) This was in a letter I received about a week and a half later.
It hit me that this was the soonest he could’ve talked to me about it. Of course, we didn’t have cell phones back then. No texting. Long distance calls were expensive – like charged by the minute. My family and I would arrange to talk on the phone and would usually have at least 2 weeks between calls because it was so expensive to talk long distance. This concept was lost on my daughter. In these days of instant communication, the idea that it would have been this long before we could actually talk about it was unfathomable to my her.
Anyway – we could sure surprise some of our family or friends if we actually physically wrote them a letter and sent it to them in the mail…
Think about it… it might be fun just for the reaction!
Kellogg's Pop Tarts were what the other more well-off families had. We had Post Toastem's. They were good, they weren't Kellogg's but they were good. There were a lot of different fruit flavored and frosting covered pastries, but the ones that were so cool that we loved - that we just had to have - were the Post Toastem Animals.
There were Munch-a-Berry Monkees, Tuti-Fruiti Owls, Peanut Butter Buffaloes, Berry Bears, Chocolate Flavored Elephants and Cinnamon Lions. My brother and I both had our favorites - mine were the chocolate flavored Elephants, his were the Peanut Butter Buffaloes, . What was really cool was how the animals were on the pastries. They were kind of "stitched" onto the front of the pastries, so we always ate around the stitching and had the shape of the animal left to eat last. You got cool stickers that glowed in the dark, too!
Here's a commercial from the '70s for them...notice how the hunter looks like Cap'n Crunch's brother... (can't figure out how to re-size this... :(
