Thursday, May 16, 2013

Children’s Books?


This post has been shared With Ramona at: Create With Joy
The theme is Children’s Books

Children's Books
courtesy Photobucket.com
 
During the depression era, books were a luxury, and our family did not even own a picture book.   
 
My husband says the same thing, that out on the farm, food was most important, and shoes and clothes came next. 
 
He cannot remember ever owning a book until he was in school and could purchase those "Big Little Books," for a dime.

I can remember my mother playing patty cake with me, and singing lullabies, such as rock a bye baby in the tree tops, and the wind blowing the cradle falling down as she would pretend to catch me. 

As I advanced and was placed in Sunday school, there were pretty pictures about the Bible story on a large roll, and we were given a small card with the same picture on it to take home. 

My first introduction to books was the school readers, which we were not allowed to take home.  My wise first grade teacher could see my fascination with books, and she gave me the job of alphabetically shelving the books by author.

As I learned to read, mother would walk us to the local library and we were permitted to take home five books.  Most of them were “How to do crafts” and such to keep us occupied.

Each evening mother would line up the three of us, and she would read the funny papers, and a continued story about Uncle Wiggly, a white rabbit. 

Still we did not own a book.

I can remember my mother using small “free” recipe books from Crisco and Spry that we used inorder to learn how to make cookies and baked goods.  Her other recipes were hand written handed down from her mother.

My cousin Walton brought us children some comic books that he had finished reading, and from those we traded with children in our neighborhood for other comic book stories.

At age 12 my mother gave me a Bible for learning all the books of the Bible. As far as I can remember that was my first real book. 

It was not necessary to purchase books, because the school and our local library had all the books we needed.

When our first child came along, at my baby shower, one of the gifts was a large picture book with many of the farm animals in it.  Our son loved to look at that book and say the names of each animal.  That book was a well worn treasure.

The small Golden books were inexpensive and I did purchase some of them for our children. 

Today I try to purchase books written by my friends, and am having a problem finding time to read some of them. 

There are so many interesting stories on the internet that these often take first place.


Find some awesome posts Shared with Nantawa Bennett at Happy Friday 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I enjoyed your story. I have so many books and so does my little one. Have a great weekend! New follower http://georgielee.blogspot.com

Floyd said...

I guess you couldn't ask for a better first book! We didn't have a lot of books around either, but like you, I got real use out of the school library. Man alive how the world has changed...