The Teaberry Shuffle

Day 210

I woke this morning with the Teaberry Gum commercial playing on my mental film reel. This music was stuck in my head for years. In the 60’s when these commercials were prevalent, I was much younger and of course did the Teaberry Shuffle. Not sure I could do it today without my knees giving out! The song (Mexican Shuffle) was written by Sol Luck and performed by Herb Alpert. Herb Alpert’s music was heavily featured on television and radio back in the day. I loved the gum, too, so there was that!

From that thought, my mind went to gum in general. We chewed SO much gum back then. We all made chains from gum wrappers. The goal was to make one as long as possible. These days gum does not have the individual branding label on every piece, so making one of these treasures would take a long time.

I tried to find a video on YouTube to explain how to make a gum wrapper chain, but none of them matched the way we once folded the gum wrappers. Most of the images I found were not clear on the copyright, so if you are curious to see images you can do a Google search. I did see that making similar chains, purses and the like are now made with Starburst wrappers.

From there, I went on to remember Christmas ornaments we made. They were 3D paper stars made from strips of paper. At one time I could fold and weave these with my eyes closed. I thought they were Moravian stars, but in my research, the stars we made were German Froebel stars. After ours were made, we dipped them in hot paraffin wax and sprinkled glitter on them. Then, with needle and thread we attached a loop to hang them on the tree. Hmmm, wax covered stars with old strands of incandescent lights seems fraught with possibility of disaster now that I think about it.

I have no idea where we got the strips of paper to make these stars, but you can order packs of supplies online if you want to give it a go. I would recommend staying away from the wax dipping, though. The stars really are beautiful.

Now we come full circle. Back to gum. We had two choices of bubblegum. Dubble Bubble or Bazooka. I much preferred Bazooka because of the Bazooka Joe comic wrappers. Dubble Bubble also had Fleer Funnies, but I do not recall them as much as I do Bazooka Joe. Since I am lazy this morning and believe both are copyrighted images, I will not post images. There are a couple of YouTube videos out there, but some things are best remembered in our minds and not with irritating music or dialogue.

So, that’s my Wednesday nostalgia mind dump. Glad you were brave enough to tag along.