Jill's Journal: The fun of the freebies

Growing up, my mom saved Green Stamps from purchases at the grocery store, empty Kool-Aid packets and labels from cans of Green Giant vegetables. In exchange, we received a bunch of free stuff.

In the eyes of a kid, it was some pretty cool stuff, and often had the neighborhood kids wishing their mom was saving Green Giant labels and empty Kool-Aid packets.

In the eyes of my mom, it probably looked like some cheap plastic stuff that simply made her kids happy. And hey, if she didn’t love us, she surely wouldn’t have taken the time to save vegetable labels and empty Kool-Aid packets.

It was always an exciting day when a package of “some pretty cool stuff” showed up in our mailbox, because as kids, there wasn’t much mail addressed specifically to us.

For instance, in exchange for stacks and stacks of Green Giant labels on the cans of vegetables that often filled a bowl on our dinner table, the company sent us kits and kits of kites, all sporting a smiling Jolly Green Giant face and his signature, “Ho, ho, ho.”

On any given good-kite-flying-weather-day, my brother and I never had to plunk down our allowance to buy a kite at the local Ben Franklin store. We were fortunate to have a good supply of kites ready to fly, and if the kite string happened to slip out of our grasp – and our reach – well, there was always a back-up one waiting for us at home.

We lost a lot of kites, some of which we were able to recover, depending how high and how far the kite floated off to. Others, we sadly waved good-bye to. And on occasion, depending on the strength of the wind, we’d even convince mom to fire up the family car in hopes of tracking down “the one that got away.”

Most times, that effort turned out to be a lost cause. I imagine the thrill of the chase was a sight to see, with our heads bobbing out of the windows in effort to keep the always-smiling Jolly Green Giant in sight.

My brother and I were also “gifted” a variety of Kool-Aid brand merchandise, which again, came courtesy of saving empty Kool-Aid packets. At one point in our “Wonder Years” life, I was the proud owner of a “Hey, Here Comes Kool-Aid” t-shirt, a Kool-Aid canteen and a Kool-Aid lunchbox that included a plastic bottle for, as you would guess was intended, Kool-Aid!

Pretty ‘kool’, huh? 

I think our family’s biggest take came from saving S&H Green Stamps that we received at the grocery store, then brought home and gave a good lick to the not-so-good-tasting adhesive on the back of the stamps, before pasting them onto a page of the book. Once you had enough books filled for whatever you had been wishing and saving for, you could redeem them for rewards at S&H stores that were filled with merchandise. Really cool merchandise.

I remember the day mom brought home an assortment of goods from cashing in her stack of filled Green Stamps books. The most memorable was the electric tooth brush, outfitted with enough brushes for our four-member family with a couple to spare, and a tabletop stereo that had two auxiliary speakers that I could hardly wait to plunk a pile of my 45 records onto.

Today, we’re instantly rewarded with the click of an app on our cell phones for free stuff, like cups of coffee and greeting cards, five bucks off groceries or 10 cents off a gallon of gas. And while today’s technology is pretty, ‘kool’ in itself, it’s surely not as memorable as “some pretty – free – kool stuff” showing up in the mailbox.