The last time my sister and I were together, we started a list of the things saved by our mom, who was raised on a farm during the Great Depression. She continued to save these items throughout our growing up years in the 1960s. My sister, brother, and I did not know many of the items on this list (and the list to be featured next week because Mom saved much more than a single top ten list can accommodate) could be purchased in stores because Mom never, ever bought them. Prepare to be awed, penny pinchers of the present, by what you should never purchase from a store again.

10. Rubber bands used to bundle the newspaper, the mail, green onions, and anything else bundleable.

9.  Twine. I don’t know if Mom scavenged this from hay bales during visits to her parents’ and siblings’ farms, but there were bits of twine scattered around the garage all the time.

8. The string the sales staff at the shoe store wrapped around the boxes to make new school shoes for three kids easier to carry to the car. This string was later used to tie shut packages to be mailed at the post office, which yielded two more savings: no need to buy tape and a cheaper mailing rate for packages wrapped in string.

7.  Peanut butter and mayonnaise jars. Mom saved the former for storing leftovers, eliminating the need for Tupperware. She collected the latter to be used for canning, eliminating the purchase of wide-mouthed canning jars. Occasionally, we saved jelly jars to use as juice glasses, but Mom usually bought big jars of jelly because they were much cheaper.

6.  The cotton stuffed in the top of aspirin and other non-prescription and prescription pill bottles. The plugs pulled from children’s aspirin bottles were the best because they smelled orangy, sort of like Tang, which Mom bought once and then declared too expensive.

5.  Ketchup, mustard, mayo, sugar, salt, pepper, and jelly packets from restaurants. Since we went out to eat once a month at the most, we stripped the table bare because, as Mom said, “It’s not stealing. We paid for this stuff with the meal.”

4. In the same vein as #6, we stuffed paper napkins in our pockets and sucked water through our straws, to rinse them clean before Mom confiscated gathered them in her purse.

3.  Small paper bags from the grocery store to use for school sack lunches. Saving these meant that throughout my elementary years, I lusted in my heart for my classmates’ Roy Rogers, Mickey Mouse, and Lost in Space metal lunch boxes. Sigh!

2. Twisty ties from bread bags, which Mom insisted on collecting because she also collected…

1. …bread bags–sometimes for Grandma, who used them to make padded hangers like the one pictured above–but sometimes for our family because no self-respecting woman would buy Baggies. Which resulted in a scarcity of twisty ties at our house because only other way to score twisty-ties was by purchasing a box of Baggies.

Be sure to stop back next week for the rest of the collection list. In the meantime, join the fun by leaving a comment about what your family collected to keep the creditors–real and imaginary–at bay.