A Penny saved..

isn't much...

We haven't had pennies in circulation in Canada for a while now, and I just heard that the United States is going to be pulling pennies out of circulation there as well. That's a little bit too bad, but I think it will make your wallet much lighter. It certainly has for me. Of course we counteracted that by replacing our one dollar and two dollar bills with coins that are much larger than the penny so I don't know if we came ahead on that.

But in a way it's too bad. I remember my husband talking about putting pennies on railway tracks and watching them get squished as the train flew by. Our kids did the same thing when we were camped by a very noisy train. It's a rite of passage.

Our kids sure enjoyed it. Hard to do with a dollar bill and using a loonie or a twonie seems a little excessive. (Canadian one dollar and two dollar coins)  I remember my brother used to collect stamps and coins. His prize possession was a 1919 Lincoln penny. He kept telling us how much it would be worth once he got older. Though it didn't seem terribly old at the time, we all thought that was pretty cool. Except my younger sister. She just saw it for what it was. A means to an end. And in her mind, that end meant taking that very sacred penny down the street to the corner store and to see how much she could buy with it. At that time you could buy two Mojos for a penny. Or one of those marshmallow strawberries for a penny. I remember my brother's absolute fury when he found out that penny had been transformed into a consumable.

Just for fun I went poking around for what it would be worth today and technically, given the shape it was in, about fifty cents. Good thing he didn't figure on retiring on that money.