Americans like to think of Halloween as theirs: the costumes, the candy, the inflatable skeletons. But the impulse behind it, setting aside dark autumn nights to face death and feed the dead, belongs to practically everyone. Around the world, late October and early November light up with festivals that make trick-or-treating look tame. Giant kites…
Ask anyone who grew up in the 90s how much allowance they got, and you’ll usually hear a number that sounds impossibly small by today’s standards. A few dollars a week was common, and for a lot of kids, even that wasn’t guaranteed. What made 90s allowance interesting wasn’t the size of the number. It…
Every family has the stories. The drawer of rubber bands, the bag of bags, the butter cookie tin that has not contained a cookie since the Reagan administration. We told these stories like they were quirks, little grandmother eccentricities to smile about. They were not quirks. They were a system. A household that had lived…
Talk to enough frugal people and you notice something funny. They don’t spend much time hunting coupons or driving across town to save forty cents on paper towels. Mostly they just stopped buying stuff. Whole categories of stuff. And when you ask if they miss any of it, the answer is usually a shrug. That’s…
Everyone who grew up in the 80s and 90s eventually has the moment: you buy a childhood favorite, take a bite, and something’s off. Flatter. Sweeter in the wrong way. The snack equivalent of a cover song. The usual explanation is “nostalgia is lying to you,” and that’s part of it. But only part. The…
The bus dropped you off at 3:15, dinner was at 6, and those three hours in between were a survival situation. Whatever was in the pantry had to work, and somehow it always did. Nobody’s mom was assembling bento boxes. The after-school snack economy of the 90s ran on bread, peanut butter, crackers, and whatever…