A Green Stamp Christmas

My parents use to do all their grocery shopping at Johnson & Johnson Grocery in Greeley, Colo. during the months we were working in the fields. One of the benefits we got from this was the S & H Green Stamps they gave there. The number of stamps you got depended on the amount of groceries purchased. In our family there were 7 kids plus our parents, that was a lot of groceries bought every week. With every purchase we got stamps that we collected and pasted on booklets. These booklets were redeemed for all kinds of stuff at the S & H Store. My mom would get the catalogs from the S & H Store with pictures of the items and the amount of books each was worth. As kids we spent many hours thumbing through these catalogs looking at all the toys. Every couple of days we would change our mind as to which toy we wanted. Yes, that was our window into Santa’s shop. We could pick one toy that we wanted for Christmas.
After we got home with the groceries, our parents would put them away and we would paste the stamps on the books and count the books, again and again. The books were kept in a plain cardboard box in the kitchen, such a valuable treasure and it was just in a box. Yeah, we’d licked the stamps, and then with a loud slap we would place the stamps on the pages of the books. Out came the catalog again, page-by-page, we would thumb through it again picking a different toy this time.
I don’t know when mom and dad made it to the S & H store or if I ever got the toy I picked on the last thumbing through the catalog. I probably picked every toy in that catalog at least once, no I didn’t get every toy, I just picked it as the one I wanted. I never did find the secret place where the toys were hid once they were brought home. Some how the toys made it to Eagle Pass, TX. Where we usually spend Christmas, the part of the year when there are no crops to pick, when money was scarce, and we had the best family times.

One toy doesn’t sound like much but it was more than many of the kids I grew up with ever got. Our parents worked very hard in the fields to provide us with food, clothing and housing. There was never much money for new toys. So we felt very lucky that S & H stamps made it possible for us to receive a Christmas present. So, for us during the hardest part of the year Santa was an S & H catalog.

Merry Christmas!