My Grandmother's Button Jar
Children, where I lived in Brooklyn, did not have a lot of toys to play with, especially during the 1930's. No one felt deprived even though there might have been peer pressure it rarely was from coveting other kid's toys.
By the time I was 5 years old I had discovered that my maternal Grandmother, who lived in a 2nd floor railroad flat on Kosciusko St. in Brooklyn was a fountain of good things to do.
In those days one used up, re-used up, recycled, even before the word became fashionable, and made do with or made do without. One of those recycling modes was removing buttons from old worn out clothing and saving them in a glass jar which my grandmother did that so often that she not only had one jar of buttons she had several. The buttons had functions as they were sorted through to be added to newly made clothing or sorted through to find one to match the one lost on a usable garment. All her daughters and daughter-in-laws would come to her home to "raid" her button jars instead of going to the local 5 and 10 cent store to buy new ones.
I remember that for the next 7 years many of my rainy day activities was sitting with her button jars and admiring the beautiful colors that shown through the glass. There were a myriad of colors and sizes. I can also remember even the white ones were lovely as in those days many were real mother of pearl buttons.
I was allowed to play with these under the strict condition that when I was done with them I would put them back into the jars, screw the caps on tightly and put them back where I had found them.
Often I was joined by one or two of my cousins and together we would create wonderful bracelets, necklaces, belts, and head pieces by stringing the buttons on a needle full of thread. These were our "jewels" as we became the fairy princesses in the stories our grandmother told us. The buttons became our magic carpets into our imaginations and though I am sure we were normal kids we never got into arguments when we were playing with the buttons.
We learned to play checkers using buttons. Sometimes they were not all red and all black, but they were all large buttons or close to the same size and were all one color for one player and all one color for another as we moved them across our handmade checker board of cardboard which our grandmother had shown us how to make. We became creative and inventive in the long run.
We even learned to count and do a lot of our arithmetic with buttons as we used them as coins when we played "grocery" store in our grandmother's kitchen on some rainy day using some of her canned goods as merchandise. It wasn't called math in those days, but we learned how to correctly make change which is something today's cashiers rarely know how to do should the electric power go down in the market place.
We played the game of "button, button, who's got the button" by hiding a button in one of our hands behind our back as one of the cousins tried to choose and upon winning with the correct guess they got a chance to hide the button and it was a good game to learn how to read people's faces.
Ignorance is truly bliss and I supposed if someone had told us we were poor it might have affected us greatly. I never realized we were poor until I was about 30 or 40 years old and I felt the satisfaction of knowing that I did not have to stay poor or underprivileged.
When my grandmother died her button jars disappeared and I am sure that they went along with her to heaven where she showed other children how to play the rainy day button games.