Merry Christmas from 1942!
Random Things That Don't Fit Anywhere Else Kinda Like Me, Traditional Stuff 3 Comments 
history, holidays
It’s Christmas Day, and I’ve just woken up from a nap and eaten a leftover turkey sandwich. I normally wouldn’t have written a blog post on Christmas, but I noticed something very special in one of my presents and wanted to share it today.
I collect Girl Scout handbooks (imagine that!), and my husband gave me a 1942 handbook as a Christmas gift:
Usually the first thing I do when I receive each handbook is to see who it belonged to and what dates she entered for various Girl Scout milestones. I love notes in the margins about what she did to earn a badge or something about an activity or skill. So imagine my surprise when I opened this handbook to find that Mary E. Brennan of Norwich, NY received it on Christmas seventy-six years ago!
I wonder what her Christmas looked like? In 1942, my father was one year old, and my mother hadn’t been born yet. Our country was a little over a year from Pearl Harbor and embroiled in WWII. I wonder if Mary’s father was serving in the war at that time? My mind always drifts off with questions such as these. I wonder what her memories are/were about being a Girl Scout.
And now, I’ll be reading through the rest of the handbook! I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a Happy New Year!
Addendum: Out of curiosity, I looked up the address (yes, I felt like a creeper doing this), and it’s the home of NCC New Construction Company. Mary’s full name is written in the cover of the book, so I did a Google search and found her listing in the 1940 census (yes, I felt even more creeperish). It looks like she was around 10 years old at the time she received this handbook. I don’t know if this is the same person, but this grave listing is linked at the bottom of that Ancestry page. It shows her birth date as 1931, and she died when she was 49 years old in 1981.
Cool! At Christmas, 1942, my mother, Daisy Low’s youngest niece, was 19 and a junior in college. She probably enjoyed a lovely Christmas at her home, the JGL Birthplace, with her parents.
This is wonderful and touching. If GSUSA takes everything to a digital platform, i.e., no more books, how will this memories be created? Thanks for always sharing such special Girl Scout experiences with us all. I’m looking forward to more in 2019.
Seems to be the way of the world now. Example – everybody takes digital pictures, so there aren’t picture albums anymore to page through and share with others.