Save your stamps!

While I’m waiting for an apple-cranberry pie to finish baking, and for BluesRay to make it home through the first snowfall of the season, here’s a little bit of vintage goodness.

If you’re old enough, you remember these!

Don’t you love the Barbie doll-like Scots lassie?

Trading stamps were the original customer loyalty program. When you spent money at the store, they gave you a certain number of stamps for every dollar. You pasted them down on the pages of the stamp book, and when you’d filled enough books you redeemed them for goodies in the stamp company’s gift catalog. Dishes, flatware, you name it.

Here’s a page of single stamps, all pasted down.

Here’s a page of  “ten” stamps. No “fifties” in this book.

You could take your full stamp books to your nearest Plaidland to exchange for your goodies.

You’re too far away from a Plaidland? Then mail order’s way to go!

Please print your name and address! Because a real person in Dayton, Ohio, would be reading your scribbles. Note the math required to figure out two separate taxes at the bottom of the order form. And note the zip code—Dayton 1—which means this is pre-1963. Back when an ordinary housewife wasn’t fazed by a piddly little thing like tax math if it meant she was getting a new kitchen gizmo in the mail for nearly free.

One more beauty shot of the totally-plaid MacDonald lassie.

The timer just went off—pie’s done!