Middle Aged Memories
Comments
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My mom and I made the candy and baked goods. Her peanut brittle recipe is a big hit in our family. Going try to make it next year as I love peanut brittle. Next year will be home baked goods and candies.
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Watch out, if you liked those tiny chocolate bottles filled with liquor as a kid. It definitely leads to the holiday hard stuff…like Rum Cake! (Rum Cake, not officially a "memory" unless you count last year.)
HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!
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My Mom also bought those hard candies. If I remember correctly, maybe there was a root beer flavor that was my Dad's favorite? But I think we all liked Raspberry best. And I agree with those who don't care for ribbon candy. For special occasions, we were lucky to live in CA and had access to See's Candy. You can only buy the Victoria Toffee in December now so I buy two boxes. This year that broke the bank with the price of chocolate - but it lasts several months if I'm not too greedy.
Mostly my Mom was a baker. Homemade bread every week. Fresh cookies always in the jar. Pies or cakes for my Dad several nights a week. And light as air yeast rolls. At Christmas she made delicious Date Bread, which I keep promising to make every year for the last 20 years, but…
I treated myself to the Tortuga Rum Cake. I buy the small boxes - not much bigger than a cupcake. They have original or coconut or pineapple.
I had drinks with a friend last night who had never heard of stringing popcorn & cranberries to decorate the Christmas Tree. Sigh.
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That rum cake looks delicious!
Re the hard candies: While I didn't like the ribbon candy, I do remember liking the raspberry ones that Minus Two mentioned. They were tart/sweet and had that little jelly like center. I especially liked those.
I seem to remember that the only people I knew who ever had the little chocolate bottles with the liquor inside got them from Canada, because they were not legal here or something. I live in Washington State, and if my memory serves me correctly, anyone here who had them got them up in BC, and brought them back here. I could be wrong.
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I had totally forgotten about the rosette cookies my mom and I made for Christmas. It’s a Swedish cookie that is popular at Christmas. They’re made from batter that you dip an iron into hot oil and then into the oil to fry. Once done, drain on a wire rack over a cookie sheet and then into powdered sugar. Going to get the set for next year from Amazon for Christmas baking.
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Many years ago, I used to work in a mall type of place, and just down the hallway from the store I worked in was a small Scandanavian cafe, and during the holiday season, the proprietor would make the cookies you described out in the hallway, and many people loved them and would stop by and get a few. It was always a nice holiday touch.
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Threetree, you are right about the liquor filled chocolates having to be imported. Coming through customs from Quebec we would declare candy but they never checked to see what it was. Europeans had a laxer attitude toward alcohol. In Ireland in the ‘70s if you were under 14 you had to drink at home. However, many pubs would only serve women if they were accompanied by a man and required women to have half pints rather than pints.
Swedish neighbors made a really delicious Christmas stollen which I looked forward to every year.
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Always looked forward to making those cookies with mom. She let me eat the ones that would break.
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I had the basic autograph book in grade school but I coveted the more deluxe Autograph Hound Dog.
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Spinoffs from last post…
Once upon a time, I had the autograph of Bob Crane (Hogan Heroes), before he became an unsolved mystery, of course. Anyone else out there get an interesting autograph as a child?
—————Bean bag animals started a long time before Beany Babies were a thing, right? If you love the mid-century decade you were born in as much as I do, you might even remember how there were some cute beany animal ASHTRAYS. Sure they had regular round shaped ones, but some companies (underwritten by big tobacco) made a bunch of them look like toys to infiltrate the average home and kids could play with them while also getting the subliminal message to hurry up and start smoking at age eleven.
Look how cute…now go sneak one of mom's Kent's or dad's Pall Malls. The little plaid puppy wants you to.
(Disclaimer: I do not condone youth tobacco use. The above is my sense of humor. If that was not apparent to you, you will want to avoid every post ever made by me, past and present.) 0 -
elimar, as a kid I met the original Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. It was at a Chucky E. Cheese in Massachusetts
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I met Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo, twice. The first time was on the beach In RI when I was a kid watching his show and again in the mid 1990's in VT where he had retired.
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Eli - thanks for the memory. I had a yellow autograph hound.
I was actually on the Captain Kangaroo show with my brownie troop sometime in the late 1950s.
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Remeber the Jolly Rancher Stix candy?
My favorite was Watermelon.
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Mmmm, Jolly Rancher Watermelon is the best.
Captain Kangaroo…aka the Baby Boomer's Mr. Rogers. Who could forget him?
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Yep. My mom had me watching him when I was a really little girl back in the '70s.
I loved The Muppets. My favorites were Fozzy, Gonzo, Kermit, Rowlf, Piggy, Statler and Waldorf. The two old guys heckling everyone was hilarious!
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I have a mixed bag of memories today. I saw something about milkmen and the home delivery of milk. When I was very young, we did have home delivery for a few years, even tho' there was a store less than three blocks from our house. Maybe it got too expensive. I don't recall the reason we stopped it. I still saw the truck for a few years after we no longer got delivery.
There was a milk chute on the side of our house. The inner door was in the broom closet off the kitchen. If any of you had a milk chute, then surely you must remember a time when mom or dad forgot their keys and you, the small milk chute-sized child had to crawl thru' and open the door from the inside. I had to do it a couple of times and when I got too big (maybe age 10 or 11), then the job went to a neighbor girl. You would think more crooks would have broken in that way but, in those early times, I guess it was harder to recruit pre-teen felons. ;-) Anyone still live in a house with a milk chute?
————————————————————Remember going to a store (mine was a drugstore) or maybe the ladies room and there was a weight machine by the door that cost a penny? But wait, there's more…you also got a fortune on a little card. What a deal! The machine could be red, or white, but I remember an industrial green one, maybe because that was the drugstore' chain's color.
Some real cheap fun was trying to climb on there with at least three or four friends, although I cannot remember what kind of message that resulted in. Dieting advice?
———————————————————————The little fortune card reminded me of old movie theater tickets. They were pretty basic, but got the job done.
On the other hand, in the same era, the worker (usher!) who tore the ticket was way more elaborate, right? Usually a red military looking jacket with gold braid and the little cap. Just like a little capuchin monkey.
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We didn’t have a milk chute but there was a covered metal box on the back porch instead. The milkman left milk there and we put our empty bottles in for collection. When I moved to Edinburgh, Scotland in my early twenties I was surprised to find that there was still home delivery of milk. The milk carts were pulled by horses which everybody liked to see. Occasionally a horse would run away but that was part of the fun. Breweries delivered kegs of beer to pubs using horses, too. Milk and beer were the only two commodities delivered by horsecart. Trucks delivered everything else. The noise of the clinking bottles and metal kegs was part of the morning.
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Maggie: Love the stories about the horses pulling the milk carts.
We had a milk "cupboard". Door on the outside, regular cupboard door on the inside - but the inside walls were wire fencing. The milk man left the full bottles & we put out the empties. "Piers Dairy". Luckily I never had to crawl through. If the folks got locked out, we crawled through a kitchen window.
Yes, I remember the weight machine with the fortunes.
Fortunately I still get a daily newspaper tossed in my driveway, although it does cost an arm & a leg.
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Remember burnt peanut candy? Not a fan. You would sometimes see it in a gumball machine and that would always be old and stale. The worst! It's still around, but no longer a penny.
But loved me some Boston Baked Beans. You can still find these today and if they are fresh, it's heaven. If not, you'll break a crown.
Just wanted to add that candy today is not as varied as when we were kids. My grocery store has 35 kinds of boring chocolate bars, 20 kinds of gummies, 2 twizzler choices, and Swedish Fish. That's about it. I gota get a new store!
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Eli - great to "see" you. Hope you are doing well.
I'm ordering chocolate covered orange jelly sticks again this year. Something my grammy always had on the side table in her living room. Expensive - but worth it. The primary vendor is Sweet's in Utah.
Vermont Country Store has all the candies we grew up with. And lots of the candies that my parents grew up with too.
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Minus, I have to drive to the big hospital upstate for bloodwork tomorrow. There is a Vermont Country Store off the highway en route so I think I’ll stop for some wintergreen patties and a Skybar.
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@maggie15: I don't know what a wintergreen pattie is, but as one who always thought peppermint was way too strong, I'm interested.
Also, you reminded me of something wintergreen that I really liked. It is a minor miracle that I have not thought of, or posted, of them before. At one early age, I used to get $3.00 A MONTH for allowance. I was a good saver too. I never spent it ALL, but I did like to spend a whole quarter on a decent sized box of CANADA MINTS that only the corner drugstore carried, and it lasted for some days. Allegedly they are still available, but I have not come across them myself. Now motivated to hunt some down.
Oh, my, sticker shock! The 2 lb. bag above retails for almost $23, and it's artificial flavor. Geez, with that and chocolate prices soaring, I may have give up on all my beloved treats. Comments on the retail page said "tastes like Pepto Bismol," so maybe it still IS the original formula. Whahahaha!
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l love those Canada wintergreen mints but haven’t seen them for a while. The wintergreen patties are like chocolate covered peppermints but have a smooth pink wintergreen filling. I also prefer it to peppermint. I wasn’t able to get any today but I did buy some chocolate nonpareils. They even had horehound drops, my grandfather’s favorite candy. I thought those tasted like medicine so he would buy me lemon drops.
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Horehound. My Dad loved it but it DID taste like medicine. NOW, I love it…but, again, I have to wonder if the formulation is the same, or did they sweeten it up?
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Hi, new to these conversations. I just turned 46, definitely an 80's kid, was a crazy teen in the 90's, including becoming a mother. I have been skimming through some of your memories, lots of things I do not recall, some things I do. For whatever reason, I am thinking of childhood toys. This lovely playhouse brings the memory of coming down my bunkbed ladder to find it directly below, scraping my shin and getting blood everywhere!
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Welcome Nichole, Original Fisher Price little people! Those bunk bed ladders were dangerous but I always wanted the top bunk. My daughter still has her Hello Kitty playhouse packed away somewhere.
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Boomer here. 1950s Brooklyn (grade & jr. high school 1957-62):
Weekly fruit & vegetable peddler with a horse-drawn cart. Bakery & dairy delivery vans (though we'd go to a brick & mortar bakery for bagels, bialys, challah, rye bread, and milk on Sundays—the only place you could buy stuff due to NYC's blue laws). Shoeshine stand on the corner. Dueling ice cream trucks: Good Humor, Bungalow Bar, later Mister Softee. Corner Italian ices stands, pizza by the slice,. Hot dogs on the roller grill at the kosher deli. Taking a schlep cart to the A&P (the creaking wood floors, the smell of the coffee beans) before we got an actual supermarket with its own meat & deli counters. Going to the butcher, fishmarket, greengrocer between produce cart visits and (with my grandma on Friday mornings) the live poultry market. The knish, hot pretzel, and (in late fall) chestnut vendors who'd set up pushcarts outside the schoolyard at 3pm. In summer, the Charlotte Russe vendor (kind of like tall trifles—strawberry or cherry—in a cart with a block of dry ice on the bottom). Candy bars were a nickel. Candy stores had soda fountains and also sold comic books, newspapers, yo-yos, Fli-Back paddles, Spaldeens (pink rubber balls) and cigars. Penny candies (wax lips, little Nik-L-Nips soda bottles filled with colored sugar water, candy buttons on paper strips, licorice ropes, mini ice-cream cones with marshmallow standing in for ice cream, whistle lollipops). Bus & subway were 15 cents (free transfers between bus lines, but subway was separate and required tokens sold at the bank or from a manned booth at the station). Trolley cars—and then seeing the tracks get paved over when I was 5. Neighborhood movie theaters were second-or-third-run. B&W TVs that were repaired by visiting repairmen with vacuum tubes. AM radio—the first transistor ones with single earbud arrived in 1960. Record players with LP changers (and inserts for playing 45s). Getting the daily paper (Times or Tribune) in homeroom.
"Sweet shops" selling bulk candies from jars: honey & horehound drops, sour balls & other hard candies, foil-covered chocolate "gelt" coins at Hanukkah and assorted mints at Christmas, chocolate "coffee beans" (solid chocolate, not dipped actual coffee beans), nonpareils, gumdrops, etc. and Barton's & Barricini bonbon assortments. Charms (square) & Life Savers in a variety of flavors (my faves were wild cherry, butter-rum and wintergreen—which when chewed in a dark room gave off visible sparks).
When we moved to a 2-flat in a less dense neighborhood in 1964 (the summer before starting high school, which we public school kids entered as sophomores), we got milk delivered in a galvanized metal box on the front porch. No lotto tickets—lotteries were under the table, and there was a cartoon in the Daily News with a (horribly culturally insensitive) character "Ching Chow," who'd deliver a daily aphorism and suggested lucky numbers (also available in fortune cookies) for playing "the numbers." On the subway platforms were penny vending machines for gum and Walnetto candies. Pay phones (in booths with doors). A huge innovation was the introduction of UHF TV channels to supplement ch. 2-13, and rock stations on FM. (Stereo beginning in 1968). And after the '64-65 World's Fair, pushbutton phones.
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Milk and beer kegs were still delivered by horse cart when I left Edinburgh Scotland in the early 1980's. People preferred to have their milk delivered by the dairies which used carts instead of trucks because they liked to see the horses.
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