The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

It's time to get ready for school!

Photo: Amazon.com

It’s August, and across the nation, parents and their kids are beginning the task of getting ready to go back to school. One of the best tv commercials ever is a 1996-97 one from Staples office supplies that shows a joyful Dad school shopping with his kids while Andy Williams’ Christmas song  “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” rings out as the soundtrack. The kids are miserable and Dad is skipping along down the aisles with his shopping cart tossing school supplies in. It’s very clever and is still just as funny as it was when it was introduced.

I live in an area with multiple Targets and Walmarts and all of them have front-of-the-store aisles of backpacks, pencil holders, school supplies and somethings we never had – neoprene backpacks and computer and tablet cases with Iron Man, LeBron and Taylor Swift on the covers. They also have pocket calculators, which don’t sell as much as they used to, because everyone has one on their cell phone.

Which reminds me of when personal calculators by Texas Instruments first came on the market. I was a sophomore in college then, and the things were so expensive that only the wealthier kids had them. One of my roommates was pre-med and not at all wealthy and the calculator would make her life much easier, so her parents saved up and bought one for her. We gathered around it, playing with the numbers and doing complex trig equations, just to see it pop out answers in seconds that would have taken much longer to do on paper. It was like magic!

Anyway…

Buying school supplies was a childhood ritual that I always enjoyed. Even though I probably still had some of the things like pencil holders a year later, it was a special ritual to buy things, so like every other kid, I could march into school on the first day with new stuff.

I guess because my Mom was a teacher, she understood that, and would always take us to the local discount store to buy our supplies. This was before Staples, Office Max or any of the other specialty stores, and there wouldn’t have been one near us anyway. Dollar stores hadn’t been invented yet, either. This was also before backpacks, so we had bookbags, or just carried everything in our arms. That ‘s why we needed those pencil holders.

My taste in supplies changed as I got older. When I was younger, in junior high, I would get a 2 inch 3-ring binder, a packet of lined paper and a package of page dividers, the ones with the multi-colored tabs. I had one tab for each subject – English, Social Studies/History, Science, Math and French.

I’d also get a package of Bic Pens, a package of pencils, one of those small pencil sharpeners and a pink eraser. If there was enough money left, I’d buy a set of magic markers and maybe a compass and a 12 inch ruler. I needed to buy a pencil holder that could fit a couple of pencils and pens, plus the other supplies. These supplies were supposed to last an entire school year. If I needed to buy more paper, that was about all I was going to be able to get.

Did I need all that stuff? Of course not. I doubt the compass ever came out of the bag. But they were necessary implements needed for the all important comparisons to everyone else’s stuff. Can you imagine the social stigma of whipping out a used pen or the stub of an old pencil? Don’t think people weren’t watching to see what you had, or didn’t have. Junior high school is rough!

I was a bit OCD about my school supplies. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide what color three-ring binder to buy. Black? Too depressing. White? Got dirty quickly. How about red or blue? Orange? Green? These are the decisions upon which the world spins. Knowing me, I probably got blue. OK, binder color determined. The color of the pencil case was key – it had to go with the binder. Blue pen ink or black? Hmmmm. Pencils were all yellow then, so no choice there. The tabs in the dividers were multi-colored, so they went with everything.

On the first day of school, I would take out my new binder and put in on the desk. I had already filled each tab with an equal amount of paper. I’d open it to its pristine pages of whatever subject it was, zip open my pencil case, and put new pen to paper. You had to swirl it around on the page to get the ink to come down, but soon you could start writing. Another successful year had begun. A surreptitious look at the kids around me confirmed that we all had basically the same stuff. Whew!

High school was a bit different. The binder was passé. Individual notebooks for each subject were the way to go. Plus, there were more choices of products to choose from. More decisions! Should I get one large spiral notebook with dividers for each class or go with separate spiral books for each subject? I would need at least 4, maybe 5. That would mean a fat book. That would definitely be easier to carry around than separate books.

But wasn’t it cooler to be able to have a new book for each new class? Each one a different color! Red for math, blue for English, etc, etc. We were assigned lockers then, so I could go to my locker between classes and switch them out. That would be much lighter to carry down the hall. (Our hall was pretty small, and it was the ONLY hall, so in hindsight, this line of reasoning was ridiculous.)

I did both. One year I got the fat notebook, another year, I bought separate books. There were other decisions to be made on that front, as well. Some notebooks had wide spaced lines, others had much narrower lines. By the time you reach high school, it wouldn’t have been cool to be writing large like a 5^th grader on the wide lines, so of course, whatever delivery method one chose, narrow lines were the way to go, even if it was harder to use. High school is a period of suffering anyway, so just add it to the list.

There were other upgrades as well. Pens now came in different brands and styles. Bic was functional, but not fashionable. Time to get a different pen. Pencils also came in colors, and really, the only time you used a pencil was in math, so color really didn’t matter, although matching the tab or the notebook was desirable.

There were new things to add to the pencil bag. It had to be a larger bag now, because one also had to add to the original list a red pen, a protractor, a white art eraser, not the old pink kind, colored pencils, and maybe some paper clips and a hole punch. You might also find use for index cards, and Wite Out for typing class. So many things! Only four years of high school!

I was still pretty OCD about my supplies. Everything had to be as good as I could make it, my pencils were sharpened to the same length, I had all my books and tabs organized, and I was good to go. I took neat notes and my locker looked like a well-kept bookstore shelf. In retrospect, I think part of the reason I was so obsessive about these really trivial things is because I was a somewhat lonely, nerdy geeky teenager, and a teacher’s kid. I was also very insecure and wanted to be popular. I wasn’t a total reject, but I was still the kid who was picked third from the last to be on a team. I would tell myself I didn’t care, but I did. Organizing my school supplies was a coping mechanism.

Be that as it may, I survived high school, and when I got to college, I didn’t obsess over those things, I had bigger issues to overcome. My one exception was the discovery of refillable cartridge ink pens. What a wonderful invention! Yeah, they cost more than a regular pen, but you could write notes that looked like they came from the nib of a feather pen or a calligraphy set. How cool is that? I definitely had to have one of them! How can you go through a swanky school like Yale and not have a swanky pen? Do they still make them? They were the best!

Every year here in Troy, a local non-profit collects school supplies and fills backpacks full of stuff and hands them out to needy kids. One year I happened to have a bit more money than usual, and wanted to make a difference, so I spent about $125 on school supplies at Walmart, which I donated to the cause. I bought backpacks and tons of basic supplies; notebooks, binders, pads, pens and pencils, and much more. It took the cashier a long time to ring it all up. It was fun and brought back memories. And yeah, there were several kids who received really awesome pencil bags. I bought all different colors and sizes. Also Post A Note pads. We didn’t have them when I was in school. Perhaps I should go back!