Photo Credit: The Fifties Web
The JCPenny Fall & Winter 2009 catalog arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. I don't know about the rest of y'all but the last thing I'm thinking about right now are winter clothes.
Not that we actually really need those down here anyway. Okay, sometimes we do when we have those occasional bursts of winter air. But not very often, and certainly not for very long.
I watch the little blurbs on the news every winter, showing those of you in the northern regions of our country, all bundled up and lookin' miserable fighting against brisk and very cold winds, and snow and ice, just tryin' to get around back and forth to work and to take care of daily errands for pete's sake! How y'all deal with it all is beyond me and I realize that despite the heat, this is one reason why I have never left the south. The very rare occasion that it does snow enough to put any minor accumulation on the ground down here, well, it pretty much shuts down the entire Coast and turns it into a snow day! We simply do not know how to function in that stuff!
Anyway, getting this fall & winter catalog in the midst of summer here had me reminiscing of school clothes shopping days of years past.
My Daddy, who worked all of my life as a simple bookkeeper for a very small company, used to save his tax refund for our fall school clothes shopping trip. It was quite a big deal when clothes shopping day would roll around! A very big deal for us back in those financially leaner and much more simple days. This was the 60s after all, and there were 3 of us, so my Mama had to stretch those few hundred tax refund dollars out but good to get us all fitted with new clothes, one pair of shoes and school supplies. Mama was a genius with that kind of stuff though ... she could stretch a dollar.
Photo Credit: Born & Raised in the South
We were always so excited because it meant not only did we get to go shopping, a rare thing for us, but we got to try on and get brand new clothes! Nevermind that it was still in the midst of summertime heat that we got to try on our new and often itchy and scratchy winter wardrobe. That didn't matter to us a bit!
Photo Credit: Born & Raised in the South
So, we'd traipse on over to Gulfport to the Sears and the JCPenny's store, because while the Edgewater Mall in Biloxi had actually arrived by then, I figure that must've been a bit too high dollar for my Mama, so Sears and Penny's it was!
Photo Credit: Born & Raised in the South
How exciting it was to get all those new clothes and once we got home, we would try on everything over and over and over and model them for each other, admiring our new purchases, until Mama would fuss at us to put up our new clothes until school started the next week. And, yes, we actually wore those hot and itchy clothes those first days of the new school year, even though it was still blazing hot and back then air conditioning in school was unheard of. They were new afterall!
If I close my eyes, I can actually still envision some of those clothes - paisleys & plaids were popular, and lots of sleeveless shifts, but the one thing I can remember fighting with my mom about the most were the mini skirts. Thank goodness back in those days they came with bloomers!
Photo Credit: The Fifties Web
It sure was a groovy time. And so much more simple. Peace.
Photo Credit: ioffer.com
