What Did Your Cardboard Box Used to Be?
by nickseagers
When I was a kid I used to play with cardboard boxes. I’m certain most of you did too. That’s not to say we played ‘shipping dock’ or ‘courier’ as we raced around the living room or garage.
My cardboard box was most often a car, occasionally a spaceship, and once an oil tanker. It was a fort, a mouse house, a cave where my nemesis lingered over a steamy cauldron (I watched a lot of He-Man) or even a skyscraper.
The size of the box didn’t matter. What was packaged in it didn’t matter. It was the game that mattered. Making something out of nothing.
I don’t remember any talk about overhead.
I don’t remember ever taking a test to become licensed to do this.
I just did it.
As kids, we used our creativity in every waking moment. We sang songs about breakfast. We made up games on the spot, changing and developing the rules as we went along.
Then we went to school and learned about that cardboard box and what it meant to everyone else. We learned that it was actually corrugated and made of pressed paper pulp.
And then that’s all the cardboard box was after that. Just a cardboard box.
Somewhere along the way we forgot how to make something out of nothing using only our creativity.
What did your cardboard box used to be?
When I was a little girl I had a Barbie. While my friends all had the Malibu Dream House and the fancy car and all the accessories including friend, Skipper, and boyfriend, Ken, I did not. So Barbie sat patiently while I built her a dream house from a cardboard box. It was three stories tall and had furniture made from cereal boxes – except for the water bed that was made from a ziploc baggie. I was very proud of the house I made, and Barbie was very happy in it. Until my brother cut off her hair.