Post-its don't count..

I remember a stage at school when all the girls had sticker books. Maybe even some boys, but maybe they kept theirs at home. Every morning before school all of us would gather around and marvel at each others stickers. Pages and pages of useless stickers.

I never quite understood why, but all the girls seemed to be very enthusiastic about the stickers, so I went along with it as best I could. Everyone had the usual stickers of characters from our favourite animated movies. Cinderella, Little Mermaid and Princess Jasmine were some of the most popular amongst the custard coloured pages of everyone’s books.

For the non-sticker-trading reader, you might not know that there are actually different varieties of stickers. Yes indeed. Some of these varieties include soft ones, ones that glitter, ones that glow, and ones with plastic eyeballs. I know. Ridiculous, but true. These were the ones that were most popular to trade with. Soft stickers are ones that are made of a sort of velvety material, and very nice to touch. But you had to be careful not to touch them too much, or the picture would fade. The glittery ones obviously glittered and the glowy ones obviously glows in the dark. Amazing. Some were stickers of funny faces with plastic eyeballs like teddy bears usually have.
I never had a lot of pretty stickers; I think I might have got a couple of pity stickers from some of the girls because my sticker book was very empty. Most of the stickers I scored used to be ones that other girls had traded too much, so they wouldn’t stick so well any longer. This is obviously not a good quality in a sticker. Hence the name. I use to take these stickers and just glue them to my book, which seemed like a good idea, but turned out not to be so practical when it came to actually taking them out to trade them. Hmm.

My lack of stickers was not because my mom didn’t want to buy me stickers, but because I simply could not see the point of the whole exercise. I had much better things to spend my money on, like the tuckshop for instance. I do think I had a few stickers, but no one ever seemed to want to trade with me. Most of my stickers included those free stickers you get at the counter at the bank or at the doctor’s office. Somehow “Thank you for donating to CANSA” never caught on as much as Snow White. Frankly, I never saw Snow White doing anything to alleviate social problems. I thought at least my stickers promoted a good cause.

Thank goodness this is not a problem for children like me any longer. I don’t even know what children do at school nowadays. They probably trade iPhone applications and cigarettes. Come to think of it, maybe the stickers weren’t so bad after all.