Lunch Box Memories
August 28, 2008 by Mary Emma Allen
Filed under Parenting
All this mention of lunch boxes and kits in the giveaways we’re conducting here at One Book Two Book brings to mind memories of my school days. We used either a brown paper bag or metal lunch box. (It seems metal lunch boxes are making somewhat of a come back.)
That’s all that was available then. If we were fortunate, we got a new one when school started. (With four in the family needing lunch boxes, book bags, pencil boxes, and clothes, new lunch boxes weren’t always in Mother’s budget.)
Many of these lunch boxes came with a thermos. (Occasionally Mother bought one separately.) In these we usually carried milk. We didn’t have boxed juices and beverages, so either drank milk or water. Mother might put soup in the thermos on cold weather days.
Attending a One-Room School
For the first four years of school, when I attended the one-room school house, we had no choice but to tote our lunch. There was no hot lunch program…and no one to prepare it if we’d wanted one.
When our district combined with a larger one, in my fifth year, I had the choice of hot lunch there. But I still often took my lunch box. In high school, it wasn’t the thing to take a lunch box. If we chose cold lunch, we carried it in a small brown bag.
Our daughter used metal lunch boxes, too. Then hers eventually became the repository for crayons and craft supplies.
What type of lunch box did you carry to school? Does it evoke memories of school days and lunches?
(c)2008 Mary Emma Allen
When I was younger I had a metal sesame street lunch box. It was kind of problematic and would pop open sometimes while I was walking, spilling my lunch everywhere.
Later I got a plastic lunch box; I don’t remember what the design was, but I know I had a Ghostbusters lunchbox at some point.
When I was growing up, I had a thermos in my lunchbox, but I can’t, for the life of me, remember what the lunchbox design was. I teach now, and I take my lunch, using whatever hand-me-down lunchbox or free lunch box (like one with my husband’s company name on it).
I was the 2nd oldest of 6 and money was tight when I was in grade school, so I never had a lunch box. The brown paper bags would be recycled until they fell apart. I remember carefully folding the bag flat and putting it in my coat pocket after lunch.
My younger brothers and sisters got lunch boxes because things were going well financially by them time they entered school. I remember Scooby Doo and the Three Stooges lunch boxes my brothers had.