Sometimes it’s been better for kids to find homemade activities than spending a lot of money; well, for us it was, since when I was a kid our family never had any money: we couldn’t afford a lot of stuff kids have these days, or even the equivalent.
Once my father gathered a bunch of magazines, like Life, Look, Post, Good Housekeeping, and so on; he sat at the dinner table one evening with my brother and sister and me; we had a huge paste pot, our own pairs of scissors, and a stack of magazines to make collages with. My Dad melded a dog’s face with a human one, showing more skin than fur and he titled it, “Drat Those Fleas!”
One of us took a woman’s face and added a man’s nose and mouth, with a cigarette in it, and got “A thinking witch’s flavor, a smoking witch’s taste.”
In short, finding activities that cost little or no money. 
Yeah. And I’m really drunk, so I could only just barely make out the cncept of this thread. Let’s hear i t for alcohol!!!
** dougie_monty, ** sounds like you had/have a nice, fun dad! I envy you. 
I did, Violet; he was pretty much self-educated; he showed us how to make collages; he told us stories about his own childhood and his life on a ship in the Navy (he was a cook in the years before Pearl Harbor); he sang; he played the guitar; he taught us about languages, geography, religion, cars, and current events. (He and our Mom once held up a local newspaper with the headline, “NIKITA COMING HERE; IKE GOING TO RUSSIA.” We three kids–Gary was 10, I was 9, Janice was 7–knew who “Ike” and “Nikita” were.)
He sometimes sang a Baptist hymn titled “In the Garden”; when I hear it now–he died in 1987, after leaving the family in 1961 under very unhappy circumstances–I break down and cry really hard. 