I saw this cute little pin on Ebay the other day and it brought back a flood of childhood memories:
It is made by Avon, circa early 1970s. It is not just ANY piece of jewelry-- if you lift up the head flap, you might find some girly perfume underneath:
Here is the story that goes with this pin...
When I was six years old, we lived in Bellevue in a nice, middle-class neighborhood. Both of my parents worked-- my father worked at Boeing and my mother was a secretary for an insurance firm. There were three of us kids then-- my older sister was 10, I was 6 and my brother was 5 and we all attended the local elementary school.
Some afternoons we went to a neighbor's house after school. Some afternoons we were on our own until our parents came home from work. We were all REALLY EXCITED about the upcoming holidays. We had already visited Santa and written our Christmas wish lists. To our surprise, we discovered there were wrapped Christmas presents hidden in our hallway coat closet! And our Christmas stockings were full of wrapped gifts! Although there were two weeks to go, we thought Santa was just being "super organized" and had delivered them early.
So all three of us decided to make a pact and do a little peeking (after school) while our parents were at work. We agreed only to peek at each others' presents--we thought if we peeked at our own we would get in trouble with Santa, for sure. So on our afternoons as "latch-key kids". we took turns sneaking presents out of that closet and from our stockings and CAREFULLY removingthe tape from the wrapped packages. We made secret lists of what our brother/sisters were getting. It was GLORIOUS! But it was too much information to keep secret.The suspense was KILLING us!
So we made another pact. We agreed to take turns guessing our presents and stocking contents until we could guess no longer. We made up riddles and asked questions, in between watching cartoons. We felt up our stockings and made guesses while one of us stood guard at the living room doorway. We were sooooo sneaky.
Have you guessed the end of my Christmas story??? Yes, that is right. We were HORRIBLE at keeping secrets. We were all so giggly and generous with clues that each of us guessed EVERYTHING that was coming to us on Christmas Eve.
Both my sister & I received Avon girl pins, like the 2 shown below, inside our Christmas stockings:
One by one, we opened up all of our presents and pretended to be joyously surprised. But the Christmas magic was GONE. I think we were all so bored on Christmas Day that we took afternoon naps. At six years old, I made a mental note to myself to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.
And I told my kids that story, so they could resist the tempation to repeat Christmas history.
And I will tell Elijah my story when he gets a little older. Why? Because Angela told me that he has been caught sneaking open some presents under their Christmas tree.
Silly Elijah. He is just one year old and doesn't know any better. But someday he will.... and Honey (that's me!) will tell him what NOT to do before Christmas!
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