My aunt just sent my kids each a stick of gum in their Easter card today. This brought back memories of my childhood when my aunts and grandmothers would send me a card with a stick of gum in it. When I said to my wife, “Ah, what is it with aunts and sticks of gum in cards?” she had no freaking idea what I was talking about.
She said perhaps it was a Michigan thing, or a Midwestern thing, or a Dutch thing (she didn’t grow up as any of those things). So I said perhaps her aunts and grandmothers just didn’t love her very much as a child. And then she rolled her eyes at me.
Regardless, this is a thing right? Aunts and/or grandmas slipping a stick of gum into a card for kids?
My grandparents just sent cards on Christmas and birthdays. And they usually had a $10 bill inside (this was back in the 1960s), not gum. One set of grandparents wouldn’t have sent Easter cards in any event; they were Jewish.
Not gum, but my grandmother would sometimes send me a Hershey bar in the mail when I was in college. Usually with insufficient postage, so I had to walk up to the post office to pay for it, but the thought was much appreciated.
My grandfather worked for the Wrigley company for years, so we’d get like a big pack of Wrigley gums in the mail sometimes. I remember spearmint, double mint, and Juicy Fruit in like a “gift bag” type of assortment with probably ten full packs of gum per flavor. Actually, looking it up now, it looks like these boxes, which were actually 40 packs per box. It’s possible at the time that it was only a single tray, but still 20 packs. So, yeah, he’d send us (at least) 60 packs of gum.
My five aunts, mother and their mother were all born and raised in Michigan and this is totally unfamiliar.
However, my grandma on that side would send us a box of cereal for our birthdays. Mom didn’t normally allow sweet cereal so a box of colorful sugary grain and marshmallows was quite a treat.
Never heard of it, but the Google preview for this Pinterest account says “My sister and I each got a stick of gum in the mail from our grandmother in Nebraska every Thursday.” And this person on Twitter is offering to send a stick of gum in the mail to college kids. This blog also mentions the tradition. So while it isn’t widespread, apparently It Isn’t Just You.
I feel like this was mentioned in passing in a letter to Carolyn Hax or Dear Prudence recently. In response to another letter about maintaining a relationship with the grandkids, someone mentioned all the little things their long-distance grandma did to stay in touch, and one of them was sending a card or letter with a stick of gum. I’d never heard of it before that.