Moon Boots

Moon Boots are the coolest thing in the world.

At least I thought they were when I was about seven years old and was scrambling on the floor of our den with my brothers and sisters gearing up for a rare snow day home from school.

Things might have changed in the 46 years since that time. Although, I would argue that classics, like metalliccolored Moon Boots, never go out of style.

As is often the case, the designers put form ahead of function, and while the puffy boots which were inspired by the footwear worn by astronauts during the 1969 lunar landing, appealed to the fashionable sense of my elementary-school-aged self, they had significant shortcomings.

I should point out that this was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a period of time when brown paisley shirts and bolo ties were common sights during school photo days and on many Christmas cards from the era. Chances are if you grew up in that time period you had at least one of each in your closet.

Snow days were not particularly common when I was young. This has more to do with geography than with any sort of inherent hardiness. I grew up in southern New Jersey. The winters tended to be more cold and rainy rather than cold and snowy. The snow we would get would be thick, wet and heavy and when attempting to hurl a snowball at my younger sisters, it would cling to my mitten and break apart in a thoroughly pathetic display. I always envied the kids with the shiny polyester and nylon gloves with faux leather hand grips rather than my knitted mittens because they had much more snowball making success. Having to pause between volleys in order to pick the packed snow from your mittens makes it easy for your older brothers to ambush you with a snow shovel turned catapult of icy slushiness.

Snowball battles are ultimately a contest of endurance, unless one of your younger siblings started crying after getting slush down the back of their jacket and your mom yells out the window that if you can’t play together you will all have to go to separate parts of the yard.

As it was with trench warfare of WWI, a key part of outlasting your older siblings in a snow war was to pay attention to your feet. While epically stylish, the major failing of the Moon Boots of that era was that they were about as waterproof as a piece of construction paper and would over the course of a short period of time became sponges soaking your feet in cold wetness.

As I said, my siblings and I would scramble to get ready to go out and play in the snow. With eight of us children, and only infrequent snowstorms, boots were more communal property than individually issued and you would grab whichever ones would fit at the time. The trick to preventing soggy feet, and incidentally helping slide unyielding boots on stubborn children’s feet was, for us, to put bread bags over our socks. My mother stored up empty bread bags, probably mostly due to the number of kids she had in diapers at any given time, and we would raid the bag of them when getting ready to head out into the snow.

I was reminded of this recently when my niece shared an ad for specially designed boot covers, which look remarkably like the plastic bags we wore as children, minus the the red, yellow and blue dots from the Wonder Bread wrappers. While the ad did not list a price, a quick search found them anywhere between $7 and $31 a pair. By comparison a loaf of store brand white bread costs about $1.50 a bag. For $3 you can get a pair of reusable waterproof foot covers along with enough bread to make two dozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I told the bread bag story to an acquaintance a few years ago, and they were appalled by it and quickly jumped to judgment about my parents and childhood. At the time, it was just something we did and I never thought to be ashamed of having Wonder Bread wrappers on my feet. Balancing a budget with one income over a large family often involves being creative and not letting things go to waste. I will still swear by the bread bag trick in a pinch and always keep a few of them squirreled away in the glove box of my car.

Brian Wilson is News Editor at The Star News. Contact Brian at BrianWilson@centralwinews.com.